Best Of: Writer Ocean Vuong / Comic Atsuko Okatsuka

Summary

Fresh Air Weekend: Best Of – Writer Ocean Vuong & Comic Atsuko Okatsuka

Release Date: June 14, 2025

Introduction

In this episode of Fresh Air Weekend, hosts Tonya Moseley and Terry Gross engage in profound conversations with two remarkable guests: poet and novelist Ocean Vuong and comedian Atsuko Okatsuka. The episode delves into Vuong's acclaimed novel, The Emperor of Gladness, and explores Okatsuka's new comedy special, Father. Both conversations offer deep insights into themes of grief, identity, family, and the power of storytelling.

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Writer Ocean Vuong: Exploring The Emperor of Gladness

Maureen Corrigan’s Review

Before delving into the interview, book critic Maureen Corrigan provides an insightful review of Vuong's novel. She praises The Emperor of Gladness for its expansive narrative that captures the essence of American working-class life. Corrigan highlights Vuong’s exploration of "the loneliness of class movement" and his ability to portray the nuanced relationships within a struggling community. She remarks,

"The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work, still an under acknowledged topic in American fiction."

Interview with Ocean Vuong

Writing on His Own Terms ([09:07] – [31:25])

Ocean Vuong opens up about the emotional journey of writing his second novel, particularly after the passing of his mother. He shares,

"I started writing this book January 18, 2020. And it was my way out of grief. I thought, okay, I'm fully an orphan now, you know, I said, goodbye, Mom. I'm gonna write this without you."

Vuong emphasizes the shift from writing for his family to expressing his own voice, infusing his work with humor and personal history. He reflects on the complexities of the American Dream, stating,

"Every triumph is also a moment of immense loss."

Depiction of Working-Class Communities ([12:15] – [17:24])

Vuong vividly describes the setting of The Emperor of Gladness, a fictional town resembling his hometown of Glastonbury, Connecticut. He paints a picture of mundane yet deeply human interactions within the fast-food industry, where his protagonist, Hai, grapples with suicidal thoughts. Vuong discusses the theme of found family and the generational struggles within immigrant communities. He poignantly asks,

"Can you be kind without hope?"

Navigating Elite Circles vs. Working-Class Roots ([24:23] – [31:25])

Discussing his transition into elite academic and literary circles, Vuong reflects on the disconnect between his upbringing and his current environment. He articulates a sense of isolation despite his achievements, noting,

"In these elite circles, they can read your work, but they'll never truly feel and know."

Vuong expresses pride in his family's silent support, emphasizing that their blessings empower him,

"Mentally, spiritually, I feel invincible because that's the only thing I care about, their blessing."

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Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka: Healing Through Humor

Introduction to Atsuko’s Story

Atsuko Okatsuka shares her compelling journey from a tumultuous childhood to becoming a celebrated comedian. Raised by her grandmother after arriving in the United States at eight, Atsuko navigates the complexities of mental illness within her family and transforms her personal trauma into sharp, relatable humor.

Interview with Atsuko Okatsuka ([33:37] – [50:44])

Early Life and Family Dynamics ([35:08] – [39:25])

Atsuko recounts her early years living in her uncle’s garage, highlighting the instability caused by her mother’s schizophrenia. She reflects on her grandmother's role and the challenges of growing up without a conventional family structure. She shares a moment of vulnerability,

"And I remember seeing the word schizophrenia... I was like, would it even help to even figure out what that is?"

Healing Through Comedy ([39:44] – [42:35])

Transitioning into her career, Atsuko explains how humor has been a vital tool for processing her past. She discusses the significance of her stand-up special, Father, where she addresses reconnecting with her father and the cultural expectations surrounding motherhood. She humorously reveals,

"I have reconnected with my dad, and we're very close, but he really wants me to have kids... Ryan has a vasectomy scheduled for the end of the year."

Influence of Margaret Cho ([48:02] – [50:44])

Atsuko honors trailblazing Asian American comedians like Margaret Cho, acknowledging their impact on her career. She shares a heartfelt moment about mentorship and representation,

"Without Margaret Cho, there's no me. There's without even Bobby Lee, who is one of the first."

She emphasizes the importance of community and breaking generational trauma through laughter and connection.

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Conclusion

This episode of Fresh Air Weekend masterfully intertwines the literary and comedic worlds, offering listeners a deep dive into the lives of Ocean Vuong and Atsuko Okatsuka. Vuong's exploration of grief, community, and identity in The Emperor of Gladness complements Okatsuka's use of humor to navigate and heal from personal trauma. Together, they highlight the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of storytelling.

Notable Quotes:

• Ocean Vuong ([09:20]): "I started writing this book... without her. It's my first book from start to finish without her."

• Ocean Vuong ([23:06]): "Can you be kind without hope?"

• Atsuko Okatsuka ([35:22]): "I've never had time to feel that. I'm realizing... I've started to heal without even realizing it."

• Atsuko Okatsuka ([47:09]): "I booked it. Thank you."

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About Fresh Air

Fresh Air from WHYY, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Hosted by Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley, the show features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries. Subscribe to Fresh Air Plus for bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening, and sign up for the weekly newsletter, Fresh Air Weekly, for interview highlights and recommendations.

Transcript

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[Tonya Moseley]

From whyy in Philadelphia, this is FRESH AIR Weekend. I'm Tonya Moseley, and today, poet and novelist Ocean Vuong talks about his new novel, the Emperor of Gladness. In it, Vong tells the story of a suicidal man who is talked off the ledge by an elderly woman suffering from dementia. Through their friendship, Vuong challenges the very foundation of what makes us American, including individualism and every man for himself.

[Ocean Vuong]

And yet, in the working poor communities, the black and brown communities that I grew up in, the generosity came first. That sort of dog eat dog world was shameful.

[Tonya Moseley]

Book critic Maureen Corrigan also has a review of Bong's novel. And we hear from comedian Atsuko Akatsuka. She's known for finding humor and the dysfunction of her immigrant family. Her new stand up special is about her father, who reappeared in her life after decades away. That's coming up on Fresh AIR Weekend.

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[Tonya Moseley]

This is fresh AIR Weekend. I'm Tonya Moseley. Our first guest is writer and poet Ocean Vuong. Before we hear our interview, let's listen to book critic Maureen Corrigan's review of his new novel, the Emperor of gladness.

[Maureen Corrigan]

Ocean Vuong's 2019 debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was one of those novels that made me silently pledge, I'll follow you anywhere, whatever you write. And so I have into Vuong's 2022 poetry collection Time Is a Mother. And now his second novel, the Emperor of Gladness, like its predecessor, explores what Vuong has called in a recent interview the loneliness of class movement. Sprawling where its predecessor was compact, the Emperor of Gladness opens on a view sweeping in time and space, of East Gladness, Connecticut, a town that manufacturing left behind. Our tour guides are the spirits of the place who speak to us in a collective voice. Follow the train tracks, the ghosts advise, till they fork off and sink into a path of trampled weeds leading to a junkyard packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia. Furred with ivy, their dented hoods pooled with crisp leaves, they are relics of our mislearning. If the novel's opening calls to mind Thornton Wilder glazed with Springsteen, what happens Next reads like Vuong's nod to Frank Capra and his classic 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life. Our main character, a 19 year old depressed Vietnamese American boy named Hai, stands on the town bridge. Hai has lied to his immigrant mother. She knows he's dropped out of college, but in an effort to make her feel better, Hai claims he's been accepted to med school, which she naively believes her joy fills him with self loathing. As Hai is about to jump into the river below, he's stopped not by Clarence the Angel, but by an elderly woman whose house abuts the river. Grazina arrived in East Gladness as a Lithuanian refugee after World War II. She's now a widow, suffering from dementia and stranded in what was once a thriving blue collar neighborhood. Because she has an empty house and Hai can't return to his mother, the two settle in together, with Hai becoming Grazina's caregiver this is one vision of a found family that Vuong presents in the Emperor of Gladness, and its miraculous lack of sentimentality surely owes something to fact that he lived a similar story himself. In fact, Vuong dedicates this novel to his Grazina. Vuong's gifts of writerly restraint also keep things real here. About midway through the novel, Grazina asks Hai, who's giving her a bath, if he'll undress for once so she doesn't feel like I'm some patient. Hai steps out of his boxers and Grazina looks at him, the relationship silently equalized. But it's another type of found family that this novel even more deeply explores. That is, the often fleeting but intense one that sometimes emerges through work. Hai finds a job at a local fast, casual restaurant called Home Market, although he quickly catches on that at Home Market, made by hand, meant heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum sealed in industrial resin sacks. There are pages of wry and often compassionate catalogs here describing the routines of Haye and his fellow workers, as well as the drugs they take to get through the pain and exhaustion of those routines. Every day this crew spends more of their waking hours with each other than they do with anyone else. One result is that they can sniff each other's presence. Before long, Hai began to know which employee was behind him by their scent alone. The Johnson and Johnson baby lotion Wayne rubbed over grease burns on his arms. The the traces of whiskey coming through the Wrigley's. Maureen chewed the bootleg Tom Ford BJ Wore cut with the strawberry starbursts Russia was always sucking on. The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work, still an under acknowledged topic in American fiction. Hard work is supposed to get you somewhere that's part of the promise of America. But the payoff feels much less certain to these characters. A winning lottery ticket, an inheritance, maybe even a union would have to come along to propel these characters to a place of greater humane possibility. Vuong's achingly austere artistic vision leaves it to his readers to imagine the better world he won't let himself depict on the pages of this wonderful novel.

[Tonya Moseley]

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed the Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Now let's hear our conversation.

[Ocean Vuong]

Ocean Vuong, welcome back to FRESH air.

Thank you so much, Tanya. It's a pleasure to be here.

You were nervous about this next book coming out, and I Wonder why.

I imagine every author is nervous because you put so much care and work into something. But I. I never expected to write on my own terms so soon in my life. You know, everything I did was for my family. And I got really comfortable with that. You know, it was never a burden. But then when my mother passed, I inherited my brother. My brother moved in. So my family got bigger, we moved, and I started writing this book January 18, 2020. And it was my way out of grief. I thought, okay, I'm fully an orphan now, you know, I said, goodbye, Mom. I'm gonna. I'm gonna write this without you. It's my first book from start to finish without her.

And when you say on your own terms, you mean exactly that. Because without her presence, even if it's on an unconscious level, you're not writing for her.

Yes. And this book is funny. I'm a funny person. You know, there's all of me in here. And the first book I was writing, the History of my elders. I don't write their stories. I've never interviewed my family for my work. To me, it's very ethical, ethically clear for me to not have them expose their pain for my art. So, you know, there's things they've told me I'll take to the grave, they've taken to the grave. So I'm inspired by their life in the same way Tolstoy was inspired by his family. But I don't mind their stories for my work. But because I knew that, as Toni Morrison also knew that the majority of readers in America would be white, that, you know, Morrison said that really brilliantly. But she said, I know that as an editor, as a writer, however, I'm still writing for young black women. My intention and the market are two different things, although I can acknowledge both. And I'm so grateful for that model, because I knew On Earth we're briefly Gorgeous as my debut, but it's my second book, so I've been in publishing. I knew that the majority of my readers most likely will be white, but. So I didn't want to invite folks to laugh at my elders. So that book was very somber. And this book is more my history. And so there's a lot of humor in it, but it's still full of grief because I just. I felt really icky about writing on my own. I haven't figured it out yet. I think there's so much shame in accomplishment for someone coming from the working poor, because every triumph is also a moment of immense loss.

Let's get into your origin story, which started in Vietnam, but you arrived here at 2 years old, lived in Connecticut, a small town called Glastonbury. And the book is set in a fictional town, East Gladness, which I suspect is very similar to Glastonbury. Can I have you read an excerpt from the book that really describes this setting?

Sure. It's a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfather's trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they're 30 something. And the Walmart hasn't changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time gaunt faces. It's where fathers in blue jeans flecked with wood stains stand at the edges of football fields, watching their sun steam in the red and dawn, one hand in their pocket, the other gripping a cup of Dunkin Donuts. There could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood. And each morning you'd sit on the frost dusted bleachers, a worn copy of to the Lighthouse on your lap, and watch the players on the field, blue tomahawks shivering on their jerseys, their plastic pads crackling in the mist. And when you turn the page, it would slip right off the binding, flutter through the field, gathering inky blotches through the wet grass until it tangles between the boy's legs and disintegrates under a pair of black cleats, the words gone to ground. That town.

This town sounds like so many towns in the United States. In fact, you go on to also write about kind of the center of the town where there are lots of fast food restaurants and the main character actually works at a fast food restaurant. What strikes me is that so much of what is written about America and presented about America are the big cities and the big towns. But this reality is much more real and much more common.

Yeah, yeah. And it's so seldom written about. I think we, we really fetishize the stories that have these escape arcs and these improvement arcs. Rags to riches. It's so interesting because we see it in our films, even magazine stories, things that are written about me. Refugee kid makes good, right? Writing his first book. So the story, the profiles are all around that myth. Meanwhile, I grew up looking around. All I saw was stagnation in American life. But it didn't mean that it was doomed, if you ask. My stepdad worked at standardyne.

What is standardyne?

Standidyne is a company in Connecticut. It's no longer there. He worked there for 25 years, and its entire manufacturing was to manufacture a single screw that went into gas pumps. And if you asked him, a refugee who escaped by boat, living people, you know, relieving themselves on a tiny boat, throwing up overboard, seven days he spent at sea. And you asked him, did you manage to live your American life the way you want it without batting an eye? He would say yes, because he said, I have a uniform. There's a stitching on the right chest with my name, my Vietnamese name in diacritics. And our living room was so spare because we couldn't hang anything up. It was a HUD housing rental. So if you want to hang something up, you want to put a hole in something, you had to ask permission to. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. You can't paint right. You don't own anything. So we lived in a kind of I felt like a like a stage set. It wasn't ours. But he would come home and he put a thumbtack on the wall. He would hang that uniform every single day. And he said, I live my life on my term. That was my American life that I wanted. He had health care. He had a salary is very relative for me because when I looked at his life, I saw something full of loss. This man went to bed, woke up at 3pm to go to work, went to bed at 12am I never saw him. He never saw his kids. My mother never saw him. And I looked at that. I said, gosh, my life needs to be different. Meanwhile, that was his triumph. And so to me, growing up, I realized that there are many versions of triumphs, and I'm not interested in the American dream so much as I'm interested in Americans who dream. Because him and I had two different dreams. Both of them are valid.

[Tonya Moseley]

If you're just joining us, we're listening to my interview with writer Ocean Vuong about his new novel, the Emperor of Gladness. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR weekend.

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[Ocean Vuong]

Well, one of the things that you do in this book through the story too, the main character, high, he works at a fast food restaurant. And so I'm thinking about your stepdad working in a factory. He had a family of circumstance as well at work in that same way. And those relationships, they're so fleeting, but they can be so deep as well.

Because you depend on each other and no ideology is strong enough to withstand kinetic kinship. That's what I learned working at Boston Market.

Because that's where you worked for how long?

Three years.

Three years, yeah. You also worked at other fast food.

Restaurants, Panera Bread as well. Yeah, two very different places, but actually two very different places because they serve different communities. One was more upscale. Panera Bread was a little more upscale than Boston Market, but it was still minimum wage. $7.15. You still feel it, but you realize that people were kind of stuck. The shift was a trap. The fast food restaurant was a trap.

Meaning there was no place of mobility to move up.

And everybody knew that, but we didn't dare say it.

Hai. As I mentioned, the protagonist, he has decided that maybe he wants to die. And he's intercepted by this relationship with this 82 year old woman who's suffering from dementia. He ends up being her caregiver. And every moment in the book, as I'm turning the page after I realize that, I'm thinking he wanted to die, but he's living another day. And in that living another day, it's very much like that classic movie It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart, you know, where he says, I want to live, but there's something in it where these mundane everyday things now seem kind of beautiful. These interactions he's having with his colleagues and in this fast food restaurant that are so deeply human, it's almost a reframe of the mundane day to day life.

Absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned It's a Wonderful Life. There's a moment that I've been thinking about that, I didn't put in the book because it's a little too dramatic, and I didn't know what to do with it. But there was this quintessential moment of. Of these laborers coming together. There was a woman in her 30s, and we were closing up. This is at Boston Market. We were closing up for the night. About 30 minutes to close, and she gets this phone call on the landline. No, we didn't really have, you know, iPhones. And the phone call basically said her brother had overdosed. He's in the hospital. They're trying to do everything they can. It was. It was. It was her ride. Yes, it was. Her aunt supposed to pick her up every day. And she's like, I gotta go. You gotta stay there until I figure this out. And this is the early aughts. So our community in. In Connecticut was hit with the opioid crisis before it had a term. And it was like a bubonic plague. We didn't know what was hitting us. And there was so much shame because you had lunch ladies, gym teachers. Everyone was taken out overnight. And we finished the shift, we closed out. And there was this unspoken reality. Nobody said it, but we all knew we were not going to go home. I still think about that. Like, we clocked out, we're not paid. The lights are off, save for the little fluorescent light by the sink. And we're sitting in this Boston Market just holding vigil for her and her brother. How can you. I mean, but I'm interested in that. I'm like, where does that kind of kindness come from? Where does it. Who taught us that? It's like the elephants. Every year, they come back and they touch the bones of their dead, and the eldest gets to do it first, and they form a line. And I'm like, what is it about our species that came with that?

This is a question that you've been asking yourself. I think you use the term, what is kindness without hope?

That's it.

Can you be kind without hope? There's sort of a hope embedded in kindness because there is some sort of faith in many instances that really bind all of this together.

That's a better word for it, huh? Faith. There's so much faith required in doing something, knowing there's no guarantee that it will pay off. I mean, we're told in this country that you have to pull yourself from the bootstraps. Every man for himself, individualism. And yet in the working poor communities, the black and brown communities that I grew up in, the generosity came first. That Sort of dog eat dog world was shameful. Class mobility has been really strange for me. I'm in these spaces where mostly upper middle class folks, academia, publishing, and I found like a totally different set of ethos and values and values. And that ricochet I was never prepared for. I'm still not prepared for.

You're now in elite circles, you're teaching at an elite university. You are a best selling book author. You grew up where your mother did not know how to read. You did not know how to read until you were 11. Your mom worked at a nail salon. And in these elite circles, they can read your work, but they'll never truly feel and know. And yet the people that you grew up with, they feel and know. But do they care really about the things that you've seen, the stuff that you come home to share with them? It's a privileged place to be in. Is it also a lonely place?

It is, but I prefer that they don't care.

Oh, say more on that.

Yeah, because when I come home, I'm, I'm just one more, I'm just one more of the litter, you know, and also here's another thing. Why should they care? Just because the New Yorker says what I do is valuable, just because Time magazine or NYU or Yale says what I do is valuable, why should all of a sudden that value system be foisted on them? They never had time to read a book. My mother worked from 8am, 8pm if somebody walks in at 7:55, she has to do their nails. She's not leaving till 9. When do you read a book? If you can afford a $30 hardback, when do you read it? So time. The idea of engaging in this product is expensive. On the soul, on the body. And I'm really proud actually that they, they don't because some authors, their work comes home with them and I can't even bring it home because nobody cares. They're like, oh, book cool, put it aside. Fried, died, laid it aside.

But they do care in some instance because you're caring for a lot of relatives like you're financially caring for. How many is it?

Nine people.

Nine people. Cousins, brothers, extended family.

And they're really proud. They, they, you know, my aunt actually, she has a little album of all of my press cuttings and she puts it under her, her desk at the nail salon. She whips it out, you know, she doesn't think anyone will believe her. It's also interesting, she's, I, I'm keeping all your press clippings because people don't think. I don't think they're going to believe me if I say my nephew is O Jean Vuong, you know, And I think also, like, you know, my aunt was the first one that told me. She says, I was talking about Oprah and my nephews and Oprah pick at the salon, and all the people at the salon, they started Googling all the other nail workers, and then the first thing they said was, he's the first Vietnamese American Oprah pick. And they probably never read an Oprah pick, you know, but they were proud of that. So there is a kind of symbolic pride. But I don't force what I value onto them because I don't think it's fair.

Growing up, though, did you feel a certain sense of class betrayal? I think that's something that you've mentioned about, because my sense is that you've always been who you are, that you love to read once you discovered that as a medium. And how do you reconcile that to being yourself, but also being one of the litter?

I don't read in front of my family.

You still don't?

I still don't.

Why?

Because there's a sense of, I think, ache when they see it. And I know even when they say, oh, go, go do it. But there's a kind of. When I start to read in front of them, everything. Everybody goes silent. The room.

When you're reading, like a magazine.

Yeah, I'm just reading a magazine in the corner in front of my family, everything goes silent because they. They. Because they're illiterate. It's. They have so much reverence for it, as if I'm performing some kind of liturgy or magic. Right? And that saddens me because. And it was like, everyone, shh. Ocean's reading. As if I'm doing something like a wizard, right? And also my mother, when I would read early on in my college life, she would. She was. I wish I could do that. She said, just so you know, just so you know, if I had a chance, I would read, too. And when she was dying, this is like the days they're still in the hospital. And I was asking her, you know, you say, we knew it was terminal. And I just said, what do you need, Mom? Anything. What do you want to do? And we believe in reincarnation as Buddhists. And she said, in the next life, I want to be a professor like you. Oh, Shen. Because she don't know. She don't know what that is. Right? And you're told. You're told you always thought that you look up to your mom. And I did. I did not know she was looking up to me the whole time. You know, I just thought, gosh.

[Maureen Corrigan]

You.

[Ocean Vuong]

Know, but she was so proud to say that.

Do you hold any like thoughts to the afterlife and what she can see and what she's a part of this reality in this moment now?

I don't know. But I feel her. And it's important for me to say this because so much of Asian American life is about making art despite or against our family's wishes. And I know that's true. But for me, I always had their blessing, even though they didn't know what I was doing. It was so strange to them, but they never said no to me. So when I walk into a place like this or when I walk into the classroom or on stage, my mother, my grandmother, my teachers, living and dead, my partner, my brother, I come in with their blessing and they have vouched for me. So I do feel completely invincible in that sense. The body, I can't speak to that. That will degrade and fall apart. But mentally, spiritually, I feel invincible because that's the only thing I care about, their blessing.

[Tonya Moseley]

Ocean Wong, thank you so much.

[Ocean Vuong]

Thank you for making space for me and for us. Tanya, it's always a pleasure.

[Tonya Moseley]

Ocean Vuong is the author of the new novel the Emperor of Gladness. Coming up, we hear from comedian Atsuko Akatsuka. Her new Hulu stand up special is called Father. And in it she jokes about the challenges of being an adult, the cultural expectations as an immigrant and the return of her father in her life after decades away. Hi, I'm Tonya Moseley, and this is.

[Jake Kalik]

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[Tonya Moseley]

I'm Tanya Moseley, and my guest today is comedian Atsuko Akatsuka. Her origin story might sound like the setup of a drama. She grew up undocumented, was raised by her grandmother who, she jokes, kidnapped her and brought her to the States as they both dealt with the instability of watching her mother suffer from schizophrenia. But Akatsuko has made a career of turning that story on its head, mining it for sharp, hilarious observations about mental illness, identity and navigating adulthood with few life skills. Here she is in her first comedy special, the Intruder, where she reflected on the unconventional family dynamic that shaped her.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

I've never heard try to look different. No, it was always blend in. Not to go blend in. Keep your head down and blend in as much as possible. At least that's what my family would tell me. And then they named me Atsuko Okatsuka. And then they went on to choose English names for themselves.

[Ocean Vuong]

I know.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Thanks, mom or Linda. That's betrayal, Uncle Paul.

[Tonya Moseley]

In her new special on Hulu called Father, Atsuko goes even further, reflecting on her relationship with her father in Japan, who was largely a distant figure in her life after she moved to the states in 2022. Atsuko became the second Asian American woman after Margaret Cho to release an hour long comedy special on HBO with the Intruder. And she became a social media darling a few years ago thanks to her viral videos and dance challenges like the one where she walked around LA with her grandmother dancing to Beyonce.

[Ocean Vuong]

Atsuko Akatsuka, welcome to FRESH air.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Oh my gosh, Tanya, it is a pleasure. It's an honor. This is too good to be true.

[Ocean Vuong]

Well, your story is incredible. You were born into a Japanese Taiwanese family, spent your early childhood in Japan, moved here to the United States when you were 8 years old. Your grandmother basically kidnapped you. And you joke about this, but it sounds pretty traumatic.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Yeah. But you know, what I found about trauma is while you're going through it, you're not going, this is trauma. This is trauma. This is not good. Right. I didn't have time to feel that. I'm realizing.

[Ocean Vuong]

Yeah.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Yeah. And so in a strange way, as I like processed it over the years, I guess, you know, whether it was like depression that I was hitting or. Right. Sadness that I was feeling, I didn't know that was maybe the trauma that I was like processing. And then now that it's been really a longer time and I'm able to joke about it, I've sort of started to heal without even realizing it. Does that make sense?

[Ocean Vuong]

Well, it does, because so much of your comedy, it feels like you're working it out on stage. I also want to know though, about those first years when you arrived here, because the three of you, your mother, your grandmother and you, you arrived and you were staying in your uncle's garage. Was it a real garage? Like, describe this garage.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

So it was a garage that he then extended for us so that there would be a bedroom attached and then a toilet, shower, and then a kitchen unit in where the cars were originally would go. Yeah, I don't think that built that that was legal for him to do, to deck it out like that. But it happened to be that the garage was like behind this sort of like gate that you open to go. So it was kind of hidden away from, you know, the streets.

[Ocean Vuong]

You joke when people ask you, like, what's wrong with you? You say, well, I was raised by a 50 year old woman when that's your only friend. You have talked about this quite a bit on stage in this American Life. There's a beautiful episode where you even joke about like, you know, your life is traumatic when Ira Glass calls you.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

And says, oh, yeah, yeah, that it's not good.

[Ocean Vuong]

But what did your grandmother tell you about the choice to bring you all here? And really you spent your childhood in that garage?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Mm, yeah. So my grandma and I hadn't really talked about it in depth until kind of Ira Glass, which was just 20, 23. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just two years ago. I mean, this whole time I just needed someone to be like, do you want to do it for radio? And I'm like, yes, yes, yes. Now I would like to uncover what's going on. Or else, you know, I'm fin with just not knowing, you know, the truth hurts. Right. And so I want to do it not alone. And it helped that I got to do it with Ira and the thousands and thousands of thousands of listeners. Yes, right. At the same time, then I'm really not alone.

[Ocean Vuong]

It wasn't funny though, you know, I mean, you told it in a very matter of fact way, in a very moving way as well. As someone who is always used to bringing in that, that little bit of humor into it. What was that like for you to share that story in that way?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

I always say there's like a kind of aura of sadness around me, you know, because the truth is, my mom, as we're speaking is, I can picture her right now, she's sitting upstairs in the house that my uncle owns, my other uncle, and she is laying in bed, and she hasn't left that house in a long, long time. She, you know, doesn't have any friends. She is severely depressed. And all my life, my mom has suffered, and I. I think about that all the time as I get to do things like tour and travel, see the world, come to here, the west side even, you know, as I go out drinking with friends. My mom can't do any of those things. She's suffering so much. Right. And so I have the ability to tap into, I guess, being present and real, especially when dealing with heavy topics, you know, when I'm trying to protect an audience, when I'm trying to protect other people, which is why I became a performer. I love people, and I love the arts because of that. Yes, I'm gonna do it with humor. People pay tickets to come see me. I'm not gonna just tell you sad stories. I'm gonna make sure you laugh so you can forget your problems.

[Ocean Vuong]

What's interesting is your mother was not diagnosed with schizophrenia you share. Until she was much older. She was in her 30s. So growing up, when did you become aware that she was suffering and that maybe she wasn't like other mothers?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

I think that I was always in denial a little bit. I still am. I still think that. I think this of everyone that is going through mental illness, because I think it is true. I truly believe it. That, like, however much, you know, there is chemical imbalances going on underneath. That is the real you that loves dancing. If you're my mom. My mom was a ballerina when she was young or loved to put on plays with her neighborhood friends, you know, when she lived in a small village in Taiwan. You know, whatever your story is, whatever you're into as a person before bipolar or depression or whatever that you have come across, you know, I truly believe that about each person I knew before I even moved to America, in Japan, all of my classmates, their parents were still together. So I did notice, you know, at, like, school plays or parental meetings, it was always both parents that present for all the other kids when I would go have play dates at their house, too. It was both parents there on the weekends and stuff.

[Ocean Vuong]

And so was it your grandmother who would take you to those things?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Right. So it would be my grandma. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes it would be like whispers, like, who is she bringing this time? Is it Grandma?

[Ocean Vuong]

Yeah.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Is her mom going to show up? What's her mom look like? We don't even know. Does she have a dad?

[Ocean Vuong]

What would you tell people when they'd ask you about your mom?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Well, I remember one time telling my second grade teacher, because she. She knew that my mom was sick. That was the word I would use. My grandma told me she was sick, and I knew something was off, so I was like, oh, she's sick with something. And, you know, my mom also has seizures. So that was the part that she understood. She was like, oh, wow, she. She has seizures and then she'll just fall.

[Ocean Vuong]

Yeah. And.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Okay. That's intense. Yeah. I could see why it's hard for her to physically be at the school or get places. You know, I didn't know how to quite describe her mental state yet because, you know, I was a kid. A kid. Yeah.

[Ocean Vuong]

I was thinking about that, your mother's diagnosis and what it was like growing up with her, but she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her mid-30s. Was that a relief to know a name for what you had been experiencing throughout your childhood? Did that offer anything to you by the time that happened?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Oh, it did not. Because I. I think I didn't super look into it on my own. I was afraid for more, probably. Truth. Yeah.

[Ocean Vuong]

What do you mean by that?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

So I used to go to church when I first got to the States, and my uncle, who we were staying with and his wife, you know, my aunt and uncle were going to church.

[Ocean Vuong]

What kind of church?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

It was a Chinese Baptist church. And that's how you end up going there. Right. Is like, if you're an immigrant, it's very easy for them to be like, well, you need friends. Right. And you like free food. I was like, yes, yes. Do we do outings? Sometimes we go, you know, play basketball at the park. I like that. So, yeah, I ended up there. And, you know, because of that, and then I became super Christian. Right. Like, on my own, I think, you know. Right. I needed something to believe in or something. It was community, all these things. And I was still confused about why we didn't go back to Japan. Yes. And my mom's condition and in that garage. So I took it very seriously, to the point I even, like, signed up for Jesus camp on my own. Usually churches sign up together. Like the youth group will sign up together. One year, nobody from my church signed up, but I was like, I'm going to do it on my own, because that's how much of a believer I am. What an insane thing. I had no group representing me. It was just me on my own. And so I went. And I remember at the camp There were, like, these prayer groups and prayer meetings. We would break often, too. And one night it was like, me and, like, 30 people in a prayer group. And I asked for them to pray for my mom, Pray for my mom to get better, to, you know, to be freed from the voices in her head and all these things, from the suffering from severe depression, from the seizures, from feeling so isolated and down all the time. And then I remember, like, when the. When 30 people are praying for you out loud and you're like, in the Big Bear, it's almost like a vacation, right? We were outdoors overlooking, like, forests and mountains. It was so beautiful. I truly thought that it was going to work. When I go home, she's going to be healed.

[Ocean Vuong]

So by the time your. Your mother got that diagnosis, where were you in that realm? Was. Had she already gotten the diagnosis or did that come later?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Well, at the time, I'm trying to remember when I found out that she. It was. You know, I remember seeing the word schizophrenia because I asked my grandma to write out what it is that the doctor said she has. My uncle, who is OBGYN in Taiwan, is the one that helped figure it out. And my grandma wrote out the word. I think. I think that was after this Jesus camp incident, because when I came home, I was super disappointed that she had not changed, right? And feeling really down and hopeless. So I think by the time I saw that word schizophrenia on a napkin, that that's what my mom had. I was like, would it even help to even figure out what that is? Because, like, the prayers didn't help. Like, what, What. What would help? Because till this day, you know, she.

[Ocean Vuong]

Still hears voices, even with medication.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

I mean, yeah, we had to choose, do we treat the seizures more or the voices more? Because those two kinds of medications cancel each other out. So we decided to treat the seizures more because that's more, you know, immediately fatal and scarier, just because it's physical.

[Ocean Vuong]

What a choice to have to make. I want to talk a little bit about this latest standup special because you talk about reconnecting with your father in it, and he's always lived in Japan. So essentially, you grew up here in the States, in la, where you all arrived without him. And I want to talk more about.

[Tonya Moseley]

That in the moment.

[Ocean Vuong]

But he has brought up the idea of you and your husband having children. And I want to play a clip. Here's what you had to say about that in the special.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

I have reconnected with my dad, and we're very close, but he really wants me to have kids, because he thinks that's how you undo a traumatic past. And I always have to be like, oh, Dad, I think our family should stop. Should stop. In fact, Ryan has a vasectomy scheduled for the end of the year.

[Ocean Vuong]

Yes.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Oh, yes.

[Ocean Vuong]

Yes.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Thank you.

[Ocean Vuong]

Thank you.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

I booked it. Thank you.

[Ocean Vuong]

Thank you.

That was my guest today, Atsuko Akatsuka, in her new Hulu comedy special, Father. What I love about that is that it's very singular, because it's your experience, but I think that a lot of people can also feel that way, like, we're not passing down this generational trauma here.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Right.

[Ocean Vuong]

But was not having children something that you always knew for yourself that you didn't want, or did that come with you and Ryan together making that decision based on your history?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

It's something I never really wanted, you know? And then Ryan happened to feel the same way, too. So when we came together, it was an easy thing to, you know, come to a conclusion about. We were just like, this is how we feel. Yeah.

[Ocean Vuong]

Margaret Choir, you tell the story about how being at this Baptist church, someone gave you a dvd. Did they give you that DVD because they already could see you were funny, or was it just a coincidence?

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Yeah, we would joke around a lot about stuff, and, you know, she said she was older than me, this girl who passed me the dvd. Yeah, yeah. And she said, I think you'll like this. Yeah. And she gave me an example of a joke that Margaret Cho had, which was, oh, she, you know, she's really prolific. She has a joke about how, like, you know, hello Kitty. You know, she's hello Kitty. That's her name, but she doesn't have a mouth, so how does she say hello? Or something like that.

[Ocean Vuong]

Yeah.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

And I was like, whoa, that's. You know, as a kid, I found that to be so funny and neat. Yeah. I think it's because she saw that I would enjoy it.

[Ocean Vuong]

Many years later, you're face to face with Margaret Cho. I was really touched. I think she said about you that when she looks at you from the moment she first became acquainted with your work, that you just knew who you were immediately because she didn't know. And I think that's just. She didn't know for herself when she first started off. I think that's so powerful because you know who you are, in part because you were able to see her do it.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Oh, for sure. Without Margaret Cho, there's no me. There's without even Bobby Lee, who is one of the first. Without Jo Koy, you know, there wouldn't be me without a lot of people. Right. And we can go on with the list without Anna May Wong, who's an actress and not a comedian, but there wouldn't be me. Yeah, it's, we talk about the first, you said, you know, in 2025, there's still the first to do this and the second to do this. Margaret really was the first Asian American female standup and they were mean to her. They were not kind. She talks about it in her standup, from having eating disorders to having to audition for her own TV sitcom for her own character, only for them to say, you're too fat, so go and lose weight. What does that do to a person? And I've really, I watched her go through it. But look at, I mean, look to still be doing it and crushing it, too. And she's my friend. That's. Yeah, it's truly an honor to know her.

[Ocean Vuong]

Atsuko Akatsuka, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[Atsuko Akatsuka]

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me.

[Tonya Moseley]

Atsuko Akatsuka's new Hulu special is called Father. She is currently performing her new stand up as part of her Big bowl tour. Fresh AIR Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shurrock, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly CB Nesper. Our consulting video producer is Hope Wilson with Terry Gross. I'm Tonya Moseley.

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