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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Ocean Vuong's New Novel, 'The Emperor of Gladness'
00:20:08
Celebrated poet and author Ocean Vuong discusses his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness.
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- [00:00]
Ocean Vuong
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- [00:30]
Alison Stewart
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest novel from writer and poet Ocean Vuong is a portrait of a community that is struggling, but it is also a community full of care. The story is set in East Gladness, Connecticut, a post industrial town that has seen better days. Our main character, Hai has had a chance to make it out and go to college, but he couldn't really make it work. So now he's back in town and back to taking pills. He lied to his mom about getting into medical school. She thinks he's in Boston. One night, Hai decides that he's going to end his own life. But before he can jump off a bridge, an elderly woman named Grishina spots him. She convinces him to come down. Soon Hai becomes her live in caregiver and Gracina is struggling with dementia. Also central to the novel are the eccentric employees of a fast casual restaurant called Home Market. Hai works there. Despite the monotony of the job, the staff find meaning in caring for their neighbors. Ocean was inspired to write this novel by some details from his own life, including his time working at a certain Boston Market. The book is titled the Emperor of Gladness. It was published yesterday and announced as Oprah's Book club pick. Kirkus calls it a worthy exploration of how hurt and self deception leeches into every life. Ocean Huang joins me now in studio. It is very nice to meet you.
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Ocean Vuong
Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here, Alison.
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Alison Stewart
So in the first few pages of the book, we learn that Hai has attempted to take his own life by considering flinging himself off a bridge. What brings him to that bridge?
- [02:11]
Ocean Vuong
I think often we think people who are at the end of the line need to have a grand reason. But when 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.
- [03:35]
Alison Stewart
Well, fortunately, has Grushina, this older woman in his life. How would you describe her?
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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.
- [04:33]
Alison Stewart
This character of Grishina 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?
- [04:43]
Ocean Vuong
Georgina Versailles 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 out of Pace University. So when I signed up to Brooklyn 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. I didn't know what it was. I remember googling WebMD what dementia was. And to me, I had to follow her. 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 the world alongside her.
- [06:07]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, in the book, I think he hears her singing, and she's like, I'm not singing. She's like, okay, well, go that you're not singing. You know, it's interesting in the book that he's not quite sure she means that he should come live with her. Why is he confused by that initially?
- [06:28]
Ocean Vuong
I think for so many folks who are on the margins of society, there is so much inherent shame about where we should belong belong and where we should have access to. And so when she offers a place to stay for him, he almost thinks he mishears her. And part of that is internalized shame. Why would a stranger let me have a place to live and stay? And I think what I'm interested in this book is the things that we owe each other, even when society tells us we're not supposed to. In many cases, we're supposed to just owe things to our family and friends. But I do believe a community is an extension of a kind of webbed kinship. And in this sense, she realized he's at the end of his rope, and he quickly realizes that he could be more useful to her than he was ever useful to himself. And perhaps instead of a grand arc of finding reason to live, it's actually realizing the minute, mundane actions that we are actually much more helpful to someone next to us. And maybe that is an accretion of the will to live rather than a big central thesis that we so hunger for in this culture.
- [07:44]
Alison Stewart
Just the small instances, the small moments.
- [07:46]
Ocean Vuong
You move forward until you realize you have a place. And your place is actually forgetting that you were at the end of your rope because you're at the beginning of someone's need. And to me, that's a deep philosophical issue that I'm working through my fiction to understand. What do we owe each other? And how do we exhibit immense kindness without hope?
- [08:12]
Alison Stewart
My guest is author and poet Ocean Vuong. His new title is titled the Emperor of Gladness. It's about a young man in a small Connecticut town who becomes a caregiver for an elderly woman who has dementia. We should say that it was published yesterday. Would you read a bit from your book from us? I think this section sets up sort of where Hai is in his life when we meet him.
- [08:34]
Ocean Vuong
Yes, 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 in Vietnam. The Americans had left the fields a ruinous wasteland with Monsanto powered agent or 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.
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Alison Stewart
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. At some point he decides that this works for him. What do the drugs Provide him.
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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 realize that a lot of history is filled with people who can't escape, who can't get out. Stuck in the coal mines, stuck in the factory, 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 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.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting. It just reminded me of something an elder, an ancestor, told me once, a black ancestor, who 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. And I found that to be interesting. And I kind of heard that a little bit in what your answer was.
- [14:02]
Ocean Vuong
Absolutely. That's such a luminous idea. Because I think, 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 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 Washington, 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 one bedroom apartment, seven of us, I 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. We, 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. 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. Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
You spent a good deal of the time describing East Gladness. Why did you spend that amount of time, the beginning of your book, telling us about this place?
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Ocean Vuong
Well, it's kind of antithetical to what they tell you in writing workshop. Right. They tell you to grab the reader, yank them in. It's interesting, the metaphors of possession that we have. Right. Given the history of this country and what we've done to people and bodies. But nonetheless, there's this idea that you have to grab somebody, pull somebody in.
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Alison Stewart
Them in a headlock.
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Ocean Vuong
Yeah. And I just thought, I get a lot of novels sent to me as a writer, and I think for me, some of them, sometimes you almost feel like they're optioning for their film option. In media's rest, you almost feel the film beats. And I wanted to ask the novel form to do something only the novel can do. So I spent seven pages describing this town with no people, no action. Because to me, place is meaning. The place that we grow up is the plot. It makes us who we are. It will determine how we talk to each other, how we value each other, and how we understand the world. So I really wanted to lean into that. And I think I could have only done that with a second book. You know, I don't know if I could have broken that rule successfully if it was my debut. So I like to think that I earned this maneuver to really sink in because I had the readers there that trusted me. You know, I hope that I earned my readers trust in my first book to say, you know, I'm not going to start this book on page one. Just sink in with me a little bit. Trust me if you will. Trust me, there's reason to stay and look at a place inexhaustibly.
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Alison Stewart
One thing about Haye is he likes to read. We learned that books mean something to him. What do they represent?
- [18:31]
Ocean Vuong
To me, the book is almost a mythical thing. And I don't mean to overhype it or to make it too mystical, but you know, on one hand it's part of my everyday life. I'm a teacher. I'm an educator. I teach in a creative writing program. I read and write myself. On another hand, a lot of my family members have a very troubling, abject relationship to reading. And I remember my own mother would see me read and be filled with grief. I could see it on her face. And she what she saw was at once pride that her son is doing something she never got to do and also immense grief. She saw me read and realized that that ship has kind of sailed for her. I'm doing something that she would have loved to do if she didn't have to work and labor in a nail salon for 12 hours a day. And after a to be honest with you, I stopped reading in front of her. It felt like a kind of mocking and I started to read much more privately. So it's a very vexed vocation for me. But it is the way into each other because we could touch each other, shake each other's hands, we can only get skin deep. But with language, as is happening right now, we go all the way through with words. There is no other medium in our species where we can go all the way through except with sound. And language is sound wrought with meaning.
- [20:06]
Alison Stewart
That's why I love live radio. Yeah, it's how you communicate through the language towards having a conversation through going off tangents. Coming back to your book, it's kind of a beautiful thing.
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Ocean Vuong
It cuts right through all the noise.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the book is the Emperor of Gladness. My guest has been Ocean Vuong. Thank you for coming to the studio.
- [20:27]
Ocean Vuong
Thank you so much. Alison Deep pleasure. NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.