Get Lit Preview: Ocean Vuong on 'The Emperor of Gladness'

Summary

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Podcast Summary

All Of It – Get Lit Preview: Ocean Vuong on The Emperor of Gladness

Host: Alison Stewart (WNYC)
Guest: Ocean Vuong
Date: January 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Alison Stewart sits down with acclaimed poet and novelist Ocean Vuong to preview his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness—the January selection for the "Get Lit With All Of It" book club. The conversation dives deep into the book’s central characters, themes of survival, addiction, memory, intergenerational trauma, and the realities of immigrant life in America. Vuong draws personal connections between his own experience and those of his characters, offering moving insights on resilience in the face of hardship.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of Hai's Crisis

• The bridge scene: The main character, Hai, contemplates suicide on a bridge, mirroring a harrowing family experience from Vuong's past.
• Not a grand reason for despair:
  • (01:59) "I think often we think people who are at the end of the line need to have a grand reason. But... sometimes we lose steam... and for me I wanted this character to also arrive when things run out of options, rather than some sort of absolute sadness." — Ocean Vuong
• Vuong shares about his uncle's suicide, emphasizing that despair can be gradual, not always dramatic.

2. Grisina/Gershina: The Elderly Lifeline

• Grisina’s character: An elderly woman with dementia who encounters Hai on the verge of ending his life and becomes his charge.
• America as a land of layered wars:
  • (03:30) "To me, America is a layered place of war. These folks are ejected from geopolitical ruptures, and yet they find each other in the same room. And they realize their histories are not so far apart." — Ocean Vuong
• Based on truth: Grisina is inspired by Gerjina Versalis, a real woman from Vuong's life, whom he cared for while in college.
  • (04:32) "Gerjina Versalis was an incredible person who I lived with while I was studying at Brooklyn College...I tended to her needs, experiencing frontal lobe dementia." — Ocean Vuong

3. Memory, Dementia, and the Art of Fiction

• Following someone else’s reality:
  • (05:11) "Living with someone with chronic mental illness, you have to follow their reality...I had to follow her fictive propulsions and I would have to make up the world alongside her." — Ocean Vuong
• Vuong connects this experience to the construction of fiction—how memory and invention entwine.

4. Author Reading: Introducing Hai

• [06:07] Vuong reads from the novel, painting Hai’s background from postwar Vietnam to struggling immigrant in Hartford, Connecticut.
  • (06:07) "When he was younger, Hai wanted a bigger life. Instead, he got the life that won’t let him go..."
  • The excerpt details hardships in Vietnam, the trauma of migration, and Hai’s drift into addiction as he returns home after dropping out of college.

5. Addiction & American Narratives of Transformation

• Addiction as coping:
  • (09:30) "They provide a coping mechanism to the idea of dashed hopes and dreams, which is what I'm deeply interested in as a novelist." — Ocean Vuong
• Subversion of the redemptive arc:
  • (10:13) "This is not a healing narrative...the protagonist would not kick his habit...it is people as they are, and they transform. They do, but without change. That’s deeply important to me because so much of American life is static. But it does not mean that it is doomed." — Ocean Vuong
• The conversation critiques the myth of the dramatic “escape” or “triumph” in American storytelling, emphasizing instead the dignity of surviving, not necessarily thriving.

6. Resettlement, Community, and Precarity

• Lack of agency for immigrants/refugees:
  • (11:32) "So much of our life was out of our hands. We couldn’t plan where we were heading...We were taken into the Baptist church, given free food...the Black community in Hartford knew we were heading into America, that we had to quickly understand in order to survive." — Ocean Vuong
• Vuong movingly recounts the role Hartford’s Black and brown communities played in helping his family settle, highlighting inter-community solidarity.
• Stark improvements still coexist with precarity:
  • (13:16) "My grandmother coming to the window...she said, 'Look, the windows open and close with locks. We did it. There’s glass. Look how sturdy.' Mind you, we were in a refugee camp with a tin roof two months prior..." — Ocean Vuong

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• (01:59) Ocean Vuong on the unremarkable but real push to the edge:
  "We often believe there should be a dramatic reason...sometimes we lose steam."
• (03:30) On shared legacies of violence in America:
  "America's most promising moment for itself is recognizing that it is a history of war. And from those wars, it is also a history of life and life-building."
• (05:11) On living with dementia and fiction-making:
  "Who am I to say that her reality was any less real than mine?"
• (10:13) On the non-triumphant narrative:
  "This is not a healing narrative...people as they are, and they transform, but without change."
• (11:32) On immigrant adaptation and community solidarity:
  "We were taken into the Baptist church, given free food...they saw the precarity of our situation more clearly than we ever did."

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:30] - Introduction to the novel and book club announcement
• [01:59] - Vuong on suicide, hope, and starting points for fiction
• [03:30] - Discussion of Grisina’s backstory and American history
• [04:32] - Real-life inspiration for Grisina
• [05:10-05:54] - On living with dementia and its literary lessons
• [06:07-09:11] - Author reading: Hai’s background and struggles
• [09:30-11:06] - Addiction, coping, breaking the “healing” narrative
• [11:32-13:59] - Immigration, lack of control, and cross-cultural alliances

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Episode Tone & Language

The conversation is compassionate, reflective, and candid. Vuong brings a poetic attentiveness to trauma, resilience, and everyday survival, always linking personal history to broader cultural patterns. Both interviewer and guest focus on empathy and the dignity of real, marginalized experience—often challenging familiar American narratives about redemption, transformation, and “success.”

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Quick Recap

• The Emperor of Gladness tells the story of Hai, a Vietnamese American navigating despair and addiction in a post-industrial Connecticut town, and his unlikely bond with Grisina, an elderly woman with dementia.
• Ocean Vuong draws on his own trauma, caretaking experiences, and immigrant background to create nuanced, authentic characters.
• The discussion subverts standard “healing” arcs in fiction, focusing on static but meaningful forms of endurance and community.
• Uplifting moments of generosity across communities are foregrounded, especially among refugees and Black and brown neighborhoods in Hartford.

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For more information and access to the novel for the Get Lit club, visit wnyc.org/getlit.

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Transcript

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[Alison Stewart]

You are listening to wny. Welcome to nyc. I'm Alison Stewart. It's a new year and that means it's time for a new get lit with all of it book Club selection. We are kicking off the new season by reading the Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Huang. It was named one of the best books of 2025 by the New Yorker, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and more. The story follows Hai, a young man struggling in a small post industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut. Hai has dropped out of college, but he hasn't told his mom. She actually thinks he's going to medical school. Hai has addiction issues and finds himself feeling hopeless. One day he considers taking his own life while on a bridge. But before he can do it, he is spotted by an elderly woman named Grisina. Grisina offers to let Hai stay at her house, where he learns that she's struggling with dementia. He becomes her caretaker, but he has to have a job as well, one he finds at a fast casual restaurant full of people with hopes and dreams. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, you can borrow an E copy of the novel and you can get free tickets to our January 20th get lit with all of it book Club event at the Stavros Niarchos foundation library. Head to wnyc.org getlit to find out how. Now here's a preview of the book to get you a little excited to start reading. This is a bit of my conversation with Ocean Vuong last year. I began by asking what events brought Hyde to the bridge the night he decides to take his own life.

[Ocean Vuong]

I think often we we think people who are at the end of the line need to have a grand reason. But when my my own uncle took his own life in 2012, he was 28, I was 24. So he was like a brother to me. We grew up in this country. We were in the refugee camps together. And when he in his letter, I'll just paraphrase it, he said something to the extent of I just had enough of it, as if he was pushing something away. And that really struck me because we often believe there should be a dramatic reason that this is not enough. But sometimes we lose steam and for me I wanted this character to also arrive when things run out of options, rather than some sort of absolute sadness. And we often see the suicide as a kind of triumph when they step off the bridge. And God willing, they do. But I'm interested in what happens on day two, day three, day 20. A question that I never really got to ask my uncle because that's a really vexed place to have no hope and yet decide to live. How do you go forward? That, to me, is a wonderful place to start a fiction project.

[Interviewer]

Well, fortunately, has Gracchina, this older woman in his life. How would you describe her?

[Ocean Vuong]

A survivor, a quintessential American, having fled Stalin in World War II and arrived in America in the 40s and 50s and tried to make a life, and then meeting Hai, who survived the Vietnam War. And to me, America is a layered place of war. These folks are ejected from geopolitical ruptures, and yet they find each other in the same room. And they realize that their histories are not so far apart, unlike the white picket fence or the grand city on the hill. To me, America's most promising moment for itself is recognizing that it is a history of war. And from those wars, it is also a history of life and life building.

[Interviewer]

This character of Gershina is based on a real woman that you knew. You spent some time with her. Who was the real woman and what was your relationship like?

[Ocean Vuong]

Gerjina Versalis was an incredible person who I lived with while I was studying at Brooklyn College. I lived with her in Richmond Hill, and I was her caretaker. She was a friend of mine's grandmother, and that was how I made it through college. I lost my housing when I dropped.

[Ocean Vuong (reading)]

Out of Pace University. So when I signed up to Brooklyn.

[Ocean Vuong]

College to study English, I still didn't have a means or a place to stay. And she took me in, essentially, and I tended to her needs. Experiencing frontal lobe dementia.

[Ocean Vuong (reading)]

I didn't know what it was.

[Ocean Vuong]

I remember googling WebMD what dementia was. And to me, I had to follow her. You know, I had no right with all of my faculties to demand or correct her. Living with someone with chronic mental illness, you have to follow their reality. And it became actually a really foundational lesson in fiction to me because I realized that she was inventing and remembering all at once. And so much of my own work is about memory and invention at the same time. And who am I to say that her reality was any less real than mine? So I would follow her fictive propulsions and I would have to make up.

[Ocean Vuong (reading)]

The world alongside her.

[Alison Stewart]

Would you read a bit from your book? From us? I think this section sets up sort of where Chi is in his life.

[Interviewer]

When we meet him.

[Ocean Vuong]

Yes.

[Ocean Vuong (reading)]

When he was younger, Hai wanted a bigger life. Instead, he got the life that won't let him go. He was born in Vietnam, 14 years after the big war everyone loved talking about, but no one understood, least of all himself. The year was 1989, a year best known for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests. George Bush Sr. Had defeated Michael Dukakis to be the 41st president, and my Prerogative by Bobby Brown was at the top of the charts. It was a time of the floppy disk denim jackets, leg warmers, cool ranch Doritos and pasta salad.

[Ocean Vuong]

In Vietnam.

[Ocean Vuong (reading)]

The Americans had left the fields a ruinous wasteland with Monsanto powered Agent Orange, not to mention the 2 million bodies, nameless and scattered in the jungle and riverbanks, waiting to be salvaged by family members hoisting woven baskets on their waists full of sun bleached bones. On top of that, the country was fighting the genocidal Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge who were invading the western border. People starved naturally and scavenged for rats or stretched their rice rations with sawdust from the lumber yards. Two years later, by miracle or mercy, Hai and his family arrived in snow dusted Connecticut, their faces blasted and stricken, sleeping their first weeks on the floor of the Catholic church that sponsored them between the pews, using Bibles for pillows. He was only two and remembered none of it. He was raised by his mother, grandmother, rest her soul, and Aunt Kim, women spared by war in body but not in mind, and together they found a way to scavenge a life in wind blasted Hartford. Though he had his troubles, the boy couldn't say he had a bad life. After high school he got into college, the first in his family to do so, enrolling at Pace University in New York at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Although he intended to study international marketing. At the last minute, for reasons unknown to him, he switched to something called General Ed, which sounded more like the abandoned wing of a psych ward than a degree. By then he was already going steady for half a decade with the pills and spent most days in the library's basement, nodding off and reading literary periodicals and giant photography books. He once spent two hours out of his mind on a mix of cough syrup and oxy, staring at the Diane Arbus photo of the little boy clutching a grenade in Central Park. By Thanksgiving he was out of School. And back in East Gladness, slumped on his mother's couch. New York City, all but a faded dream. Even now, he did not understand the chain of events that led him back to this dirty old town empty handed.

[Interviewer]

There's Ocean Huang, reading from his new novel titled the Emperor of Gladness. There's so much to talk about in there, his addiction.

[Alison Stewart]

At some point he decides that this works for him. What do the drugs provide him?

[Ocean Vuong]

They provide a coping mechanism to the idea of dashed hopes and dreams, which is what I'm deeply interested in as a novelist. You know, so much of our history and our culture is obsessed with grand moments of revolution, fighting back, twists of fate, overthrowing bosses, overthrowing wars and tyrants. And the history book marks those. And a lot of fiction and movies come out of those grand moments. But when I look at the archive, I actually realized that a lot of history is filled with people who can't.

[Ocean Vuong (reading)]

Escape, who can't get out. Stuck in the coal mines, stuck in.

[Ocean Vuong]

The factories, stuck in marriages that perhaps they didn't even want to have, that they couldn't break out, they couldn't follow their dreams. And that actually is deeply interesting to me because the question then for the writer is, what is the point if the plot does not lead you to escape? And to me, the point is people. I'm more interested in people trying their best. And so this is not a healing narrative. I knew when I wrote this book that. That the protagonist would not kick his habit. You know, people won't get a raise, they won't get out of town. It's not going to be rags to riches. Instead, it is people as they are, and they transform. They do, but without change. That's deeply important to me because so much of American life is static. But it does not mean that it is doomed.

[Alison Stewart]

It's interesting.

[Interviewer]

It just reminded me of something in an elder. An ancestor told me once, a black ancestor told me, well, when we were really, really young, we couldn't plan. We didn't have the facility to plan. It had planned out where we would live, where we would go to school.

[Alison Stewart]

And I found that to be interesting. And I kind of heard that a.

[Interviewer]

Little bit in what your answer was.

[Ocean Vuong]

Absolutely. That's such a luminous idea. Because I think when. Why did I end up in Hartford? It's not exactly the narrative that is known for having Vietnamese American life. And many Vietnamese Americans, as soon as they got to the east coast, went to Houston, Louisiana, Orange County, Minnesota, even Iowa. But Hartford for me, for my family, was a place where we could rest because so much of our life was out of our hands. We couldn't plan where we were headed. We were couldn't plan where we were going to be. So when they got to Hartford, they looked at each other and said, you know what? We're tired. And you know what? Who picked us up and who showed us where we were and where we were heading towards was the black and brown community in Hartford, Connecticut, the Dominican immigrants, Haitian, Jamaican immigrants who came to Hartford to work the tobacco fields when agricultural workers were sparse during World War II. And we were taken into the Baptist church, given free food. And I think what I realized was that the black community in Hartford knew we were heading into America, that we had to quickly understand in order to survive. And through physical gestures of generosity, they kind of, in a way, metaphorically and physically sat us down and said, listen, you got to know what this is if you're going to make it. And they saw the precarity, I think, of our situation more clearly than we ever did. Because when we got into that first.

[Ocean Vuong (reading)]

One bedroom apartment, seven of us, I.

[Ocean Vuong]

Remember very distinctly my grandmother coming to the window and she's showing me, she said, look, the windows open and close with locks. We did it. There's glass. Look how sturdy. Mind you, we were in a refugee camp with a tin roof two months prior. So, you know, there was kind of this hallucinatory power of being absolutely privileged and yet in an incredibly precarious economic world of new American life. And it was the black and brown community of Hartford that really taught me what America truly was.

[Alison Stewart]

That was part of my conversation with author Ocean Vuong about his new novel, the Emperor of Gladness. It's our January get lit with all of it book club selection. To borrow your E copy courtesy of the New York Public Library and to grab your free tickets to the January 20th event, head to wnyc.org getlit I'm.

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