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Modern Love
‘The Interview’: Ocean Vuong was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
00:50:52
This week on Modern Love, we’re bringing you a conversation we liked so much that we’re envious we didn’t get to have ourselves. In a raw but deeply heartfelt and compassionate conversation with “The Interview" host David Marchese, author and poet Ocean Vuong talks about the real reason he became a writer.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:25]
David Marchese
Love now and did you fall in love last fella?
- [00:28]
Ocean Vuong
For the love was stronger than anything for the love love and I love you more than anything there's still love love.
- [00:38]
Anna
Hey everyone, it's Anna. Listen, you know how our show works. Every week we bring you a story or conversation inspired by the Modern Love column. We explore all the complicated, messy ways human beings relate to one another and we try to learn something from it. This week I want to play you a conversation that I definitely learned a lot from. And honestly, I. I am so envious I didn't get to have it myself. It's from another Times podcast called the Interview, and it's a conversation between host David Marchese and the author and poet Ocean Vuong. There is so much I could say about this interview, but I don't want to spoil it, so I'll just say this. This conversation is a masterclass in compassion on both Ocean and David's part. It feels deeply authentic and human, and we over here at Modern Love thought it would feel right at home in our fe. I'll leave it at that and just drop you right into it. Here's David.
- [01:45]
David Marchese
From the New York Times. This is the Interview. I'm David Marchese. In a lot of ways, Ocean Huang's life makes for a classic American success story. He and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam in 1990, when he was just a small child. They landed in Hartford, Connecticut and pretty quickly fell into a hardscrabble existence ruled by low paying work and low expectations. Until, that is, Ocean discovered literature and his own gift for writing. Vuong is now one of the country's most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a genius grant, and he's a professor in the creative Writing department at New York University. His debut novel, On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous, came out in 2019 and became a bestseller and a bonafide millennial classic. All this and he 36 years old. But there's another side to Vuong's story, and that's about the flip side of success and lingering pain of his mixed up youth. It's that part of his story, the one that doesn't resolve so neatly that lies at the heart of his new novel, the Emperor of Gladness. It's a bigger book in every respect than his first. I'll say, too, that the book was a launching pad for what turned out to be one of the most emotionally intense interviews I think I've ever done. Here's my conversation with Ocean Vuong. Thank you for taking the time to do this. I appreciate it.
- [03:17]
Ocean Vuong
Thank you, David. Pleasure.
- [03:18]
David Marchese
So, Emperor of Gladness, your new novel is based, at least in part, on your experiences working at fast food restaurants in small town Connecticut. So where did you work and what were the jobs?
- [03:33]
Ocean Vuong
I worked at a place called Boston Market and a place called Panera, and I was living in HUD housing, this one bedroom apartment with my mother and my brother. It was this kind of situation where if your family income surpassed, then you can't live there anymore, but the next housing opportunity would be unaffordable to us. So my mother literally said, you know, when you get a job, just work at McDonald's to stay under McDonald's, 715 an hour, which is minimum wage. And in the summers, I worked on a tobacco farm, which is 950 cash, no uncle Sam involved. So you confront, as a teenager immediately this kind of like antithesis of like American prosperity and upward mobility, where it's like, don't make too much money or we'll be homeless. But a lot of people had that predicament. So I went to Boston Market, which is now like a very eye opening experience of American life, I think.
- [04:28]
David Marchese
Yeah. What did you learn about people from working at Boston Market and Panera Bread?
- [04:33]
Ocean Vuong
Well, first of all, I learned that everything is about deception. Right. We didn't cook anything. The entire thing was a series of microwaves in various, you know, it's taking frozen sacks of food in giant plastic bags, reheating it, and then presenting wholesome home cooked meals. But what I learned was, you know, we have this idea of American life being the nuclear family, but I think a huge portion of how this country is formed is through circumstantial family labor. This arbitrary cobbling of strangers thrown together. And then we have to kind of sacrifice relationships with our own family in order to be here. And yet intimacies arise despite that, because human beings, no matter where they are, will find bounding relationships. And a month in, you'll start to know whose cough belongs to who. You'll know when you know Joe's drugstore deodorant will wear off at which hour. Right. I'm like, we're at the third Hour, I'm going to start to smell his BO underneath the deodorant. And there's nothing more intimate than that. But you also, you're so dependent on each other. You know, I'm not a soldier, so I would never compare it to. To war, but it's just kind of like going through a battle sometimes. Especially when, you know you're about to close and a purple bus pulls up and it's a bunch of Catholic school kids off to their prom and you're slammed, and you have to depend on each other. And there's a kindness that arises out of that. There's also a deep frustration.
- [06:12]
David Marchese
What frustration?
- [06:13]
Ocean Vuong
That underneath it all, every employee kind of knows that this is not it. This is not the way out. And it's kind of the elephant in the room. And the manager is paid just a little more than us. I think at that time, they were paid maybe 13 to 15. We were paid 7:15, so, you know, almost double. But the suffering that they went through showed us it wasn't enough. Like my first, I watched someone get promoted and then turn it down. Right. It was like we had this ceremony. We're promoting somebody, and it was like a grand thing. The manager came out, we closed the stores like, all right, you know, we're gonna promote Jennifer today and welcome Jennifer. And she's just like, I don't want it too much.
- [06:58]
David Marchese
She didn't want the responsibility.
- [06:59]
Ocean Vuong
She didn't want the responsibility. Yeah, yeah.
- [07:01]
David Marchese
It's a slightly different setting, but I worked as a waiter for a catering company, and so much of what you just said paralleled exactly my experience of that. The way you're just sort of thrown in with this group of disparate people. Somehow you make it work. You know, people get on your nerves. There's other people you like. There's people you can rely on, there's people you can't rely. But at the end of the night, everyone has done their jobs. But I will say we worked a lot of bar mitzvahs and weddings and the parties for that. You know, anniversaries, retirement parties. And that's when I realized, like, that you learn so much about people from the way they treat their presumed subordinates.
- [07:37]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's interesting because the fast food restaurant, in a way, obfuscates the workers humanity because everyone's in a uniform. You're just hands. Your most valuable asset are your hands, not your personhood. And I think there's what I'm interested in this novel and in my life in General is when humanity breaches these moments. To this day, I think it's almost 20 years ago now, but till the end of my life, I will remember this one moment. I was being trained by this man named Ruben. One day we were cleaning the freezer, and I don't know what to do with this fact, but it's just. I didn't put it in the book because it's too dramatic. You know, sometimes life is like, both cornier and more dramatic than any fiction you can do. But it's been haunting me for forever. I'm 19, and we have our backs together. It's like maybe like six foot wide, and it's almost touching. And we're just cleaning and we're talking about family. And he stops and he says this thing, he has his back to me. He says, you know, it's something I can never tell my wife. I was like, oh, my God.
- [08:53]
David Marchese
Uh, oh.
- [08:54]
Ocean Vuong
And he Sundays, I have three sons and I only love one of them. And I. I'm. I'm. I don't. All I know how to do is just give affirmative. Like, I'm not. I don't know how to receive this, you know. And I said, oh, okay, all right. Why? You know, he says, you know, there's nothing. I have no real connection with the son that I love. And the others do right by me, I do right by them. I don't understand it, but I knew it early on. And he's like, just watch out. In life that's going to happen. You're supposed to love people, but you're not. You're going to find out that God chooses these things for you. And to this day, I don't know what it means, but I thought it was just such an incredible.
- [09:38]
David Marchese
Did that ever come up again?
- [09:40]
Ocean Vuong
No. And I said, why did that happen? Why in a freezer in East Hartford, Connecticut, does a man tell me something that I think has only been uttered in that freezer to this day?
- [09:54]
David Marchese
Yeah, well, you know, that story and your book and the experience you described of working at a fast food restaurant really connect for me to a larger question I have about the country and how we understand each other. The ember of Gladness is set in this sort of small town in Connecticut. And it's a town where it seems like there are not great job prospects. You know, there's a lot of poverty. What do you understand about places like East Hartford that maybe doesn't get communicated widely enough?
- [10:29]
Ocean Vuong
You know, I think as a culture, we always want this sort of grand arc rags to riches. Gets the girl, gets the guy. We know where the body is. We know who the killer is. It's like the Scooby Doo effect. You always get the unmasking and there's a payoff. And I just wondered if I could write a book that didn't have improvement arcs, you know, because it also aligned with, like, 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 called Standodyne Auto Parts.
- [11:08]
David Marchese
Are they still both in Connecticut or.
- [11:09]
Ocean Vuong
They're both in Connecticut. For 25 years, he worked from 3pm to 12am I never saw him. I came home from school at 4. I only saw him on the weekends. He would sleep in. I saw like a tuft of hair poking out of the blanket in his room. That was it, you know. And so I just thought, we want stories of change. We believe in it, we buy it. And yet American life, even at its best, is often static. You drive the same car. I know people who live in the same apartment. But it doesn't mean that their lives are worthless, that it's meaningless, that they've failed. Right. So I'm interested in like reidentifying the idea of the loser or loserdom, like economic losers. The left behind. In my first book, it's a queer story about someone who never leaves, you know? Cause the queer story is always ameliorated. When you go to the city, I'm like, some of us can't afford to. Some of us have elders to care. Some of us need to be gay in the cornfield because there's nowhere else to go. And so this book, it's not a spoiler to say that nobody gets a better job. No one gets a raise. So what happens? You get people. And what I've been really interested in is this idea of kindness without hope. And what I saw working in the Fastwood growing up in Hartford county was that people are kind even when they know it won't matter. Like, what is that? Where does that come from? You know? Like, you know that whatever you're gonna do is not gonna help someone materially jumping their car. I watched coworkers get together and dig each other out of blizzards before anyone could go home. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families. But they all stayed and they dug each other out. You know, the generosity that my neighbors had growing up in a black and brown community. We were invited into Baptist church. We knew no English. They gave us free bread and I just said, where? What is kindness that is exhibited knowing there's no payoff?
- [13:20]
David Marchese
Where do you think it comes from?
- [13:22]
Ocean Vuong
I don't know. I write, you know, David, I've been really interested in kindness as an intrinsic thing and goodness as an intrinsic thing. Like my brother just has it. He came with kindness. I never had it. I had a desire to understand goodness, but I never had it the way like my brother does. And I know because I raised him when my parents were at the factories, in the nail salon, were 10 years apart. So I was holding a little baby in my arms as a 10 year old, feeding him, you know, milk. So I'm like, I raised him. I didn't give. I didn't give him that. He had it. And I'm just interested in that because I don't. It's strange to me. I don't know it, you know, it doesn't come natural to me. And I've been in dicey situations in my life where I realized that very early on I just don't have it.
- [14:17]
David Marchese
Were you exhibited cruelty?
- [14:20]
Ocean Vuong
I don't know if it would be cruelty, but I think certain anger, certain rage, certain desires that I think would have never exhibited in someone like my brother. And there was a moment when I was 15 that I think, I've been trying to articulate this for so long and your question is now putting me down the slippery slope. I've been trying to articulate it because I think it's important, but I've been really ashamed of it because people ask me, you know, why did you become a writer? And I give the answer that I think makes sense. I went to Pace, I tried business school because I wanted to help my mother and I couldn't do it. And then I went to Brooklyn and I went to the English department. Then I became a writer. That's not untrue. I don't know if it's honest, you know, and your question is now bringing me to this idea of cruelty and. And goodness. I would say that there was this one event when I was 15 that I do think altered the course of my life. Although at that time it was not an epiphanic moment. Like I didn't say, oh, you know. But I would say that the desire to be a writer probably started with the desire to commit myself to understanding suffering.
- [15:39]
David Marchese
What was the moment?
- [15:43]
Ocean Vuong
I'm trying to be eloquent with this. I don't know if I will be. When I was 15, I'll say it first and I'll describe it right when I was 15. I decided to kill somebody.
- [16:01]
David Marchese
Oh, my God.
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Ocean Vuong
I didn't do it. Oh, my God. I was working on the tobacco farm every summer, and I rode my bike every day. I didn't have a car. I didn't have a license. It was about five miles out. You wake up, like, at six in the morning. I rode my bike and I went to work mostly with migrant farmers. You get paid under the table, and if you show up every day, you get a $1,000 bonus at the end of the season. And it was this hot July evening. I was in my room, and I look out the window, and I see that someone has stolen my bike. And it was someone I knew in a neighborhood who's a drug dealer. And it was a time. It was like 2002, 2003. So everybody's outside. Nobody's. There's no indoor kids, at least not in my neighborhood. So you would put your bike outside in the stoop when you're running in and out. And this guy was known to just grab your bike and he would never, like, give it back to you. It was just very, you know, and there's nothing you could do about it.
- [17:13]
David Marchese
Sloppy thief, basically.
- [17:15]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah. Yeah. But he kind of knew. Like, he just didn't. The idea wasn't to steal. It was kind of like power. It was kind of. Right.
- [17:20]
David Marchese
He was showing you he could take.
- [17:22]
Ocean Vuong
Invaluable stuff whenever he needed it. He'll just grab a kid's bike. And it was kind. You were under the mercy of it. So it was a chronic thing. But I just snapped that day, you know, like, I just saw him, and I was so angry because I knew. I knew, I knew. I'm like, I'm not going to get this back. I'm going to lose my thousand dollars. And for context, like, when I end up doing my mom's taxes, she made $13,000.
- [17:51]
David Marchese
Right.
- [17:53]
Ocean Vuong
And what I did was, he's riding around, there's people, you know, And I go out and I said just. I screamed, give me back my bike. You know, and essentially he just said, f, off. And I knew that that's the vibe. But I just. I think that day I lost it. You know, I was on drugs at the time. You know, I had my first cigarette when I was 14. Two weeks later, I'm doing lines of coke in the high school dugout, in the baseball. But I was sober that day. Right. It got worse in the farm because the migrant workers were using it, too. You take a bump to do the.
- [18:27]
David Marchese
Work, get through the day.
- [18:27]
Ocean Vuong
To get through the day. And they loved that I did it because I was a kid, and they kind of took me under. It was kind of really toxic, you know? But that day, I was cleared, and I went across the street, diagonal to my friend Big Joe's house. I knocked on his window. I remember putting both of my hands on the windowsill, and I have no shirt on. I'm just sweating. I'm so angry. And I just told him, I said, please let me borrow your gun.
- [19:04]
David Marchese
You don't have to.
- [19:05]
Ocean Vuong
I'm so sorry.
- [19:05]
David Marchese
You don't have to finish the story.
- [19:06]
Ocean Vuong
Okay.
- [19:09]
David Marchese
Can I give you a hug? Would you. It's okay. I really appreciate that you're being honest, but if it's too much, we can just stop. Do you Just tell me. Okay.
- [19:21]
Ocean Vuong
Okay. I think what I'm trying to get at is that I didn't become an author just to, like. My goal was not to, like, have a photo in the back of a book and be, like, an author. Writing became a medium for me to try to understand, like, what. What goodness is.
- [19:43]
David Marchese
Yeah.
- [19:44]
Ocean Vuong
Because when I. When I was begging my friend, I said, please give me your gun. And I know. I know that gun because we used it. We would shoot it. He would take me to the woods, and we would just shoot. And I just. So I'm like, please, just get up real quick. And I had it in my head. I imagined it in my head. And he said, I'm not gonna do that. He's an ocean. I'm not going to do that. You need to go home. And I think what was really so touching to me is that I was not responsible for that. Someone else's better sense saved me. And there's. In Buddhism, we have this idea called satori.
- [20:32]
David Marchese
And explain what that is.
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Ocean Vuong
Satori is kind of enlightenment, but it's enlightenment in life, These kind of brief moments of illumination. And you've probably experienced it. Like, you know, I'm laying in bed at night, I can't sleep, and then all of a sudden, you realize, oh, I need to be a better partner. I'm going to wake up. I'm going to be a better brother. I got to be more patient. I got to stop being petty. Like these moments, right? And then you wake up, and then life happens. You get a bad work, email, someone's being annoying, and then you lose sight of all that. So satori is like a brief window. And the idea for Buddhists is to then allow the understanding in that brief window to then alter your life.
- [21:16]
David Marchese
Right.
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Ocean Vuong
And monks, some Monks widen that window probably for the rest of their life. That window is their life's width. For me, I get little brief moments, and I think I was spared that horrible outcome because of Big Joe Satori. And any other day he would have done it, right? But he saw that it's not going to be good, and it was his wisdom. And, you know, you tell yourself you're in control of your life and all that, but moments like that happen, and you're just like, wow. I don't know. It was up to me that I got here. It was somebody else. A week after that, I went to the public library because I would take my grandmother to the library, and she was schizophrenic, so she was kind of like a thousand Asian grandmas in one, right? So she kept making altars all over the house. And she would go to the library and she would steal pictures of Buddha and frame it for her altars. And I would just sit there, and she would just sit there and just cut out and put it in a folder. And then I started to like. I'm like, what is this book? You know, let me just read this.
- [22:30]
David Marchese
What was the book?
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Ocean Vuong
I would just start reading Buddhism books, but then I end up in a Buddhism religion section, right? And I would go back by myself. And I was deeply interested in, like, understanding this suffering. And Buddhism was so enticing for me, serendipitously, because the Four Noble Truth is like, life is suffering. And I was like, oh, my God, yes, I'm on. I'm in there, right? And it's like, you are not your past. You can alter your life. You don't have to wait for anybody. You don't have to negotiate with a higher being, because Buddhism is all about action. It's all about your conduct. And I was trying to find a way out. And I went to my guidance counselor, and I told him, I said, there's a university called University of the west where you can study a liberal arts degree and then become a monk. I said, I want to help me. Help me get there. And he said, I. I would love to get you there, but it's not accredited. And I think if you want to go to school, you should have a real degree, and then you could still be a monk. So he persuaded me to go to community college. My first class there, the syllabus was Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Foucault. Then I realized writing was not like writing a good, respectable email to get a job. It was a medium of understanding suffering. That's when it changed.
- [23:57]
David Marchese
We'll be right back.
- [24:06]
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- [24:34]
David Marchese
You know, as we move forward, you should definitely just feel free to tell me if you need a break or if anything feels too intense because I'm looking at my questions, you know, they're not gonna get EAs.
- [24:49]
Ocean Vuong
I didn't think I would be here this quick either.
- [24:52]
David Marchese
But you know, I realize in the way I've described the novel, I've elided one of the most important aspects of the story, and that's the central relationship of the novel is between a young Vietnamese immigrant character named Hai.
- [25:12]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah.
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David Marchese
And an 82 year old Lithuanian woman whose name is Gretsina Gratina.
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Ocean Vuong
Yeah.
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David Marchese
And Hai winds up through sort of series of twists and turns becoming a caregiver for Gratina who has dementia. And the novel is dedicated to a real life Gratzina.
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Ocean Vuong
Yeah.
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David Marchese
Can you tell me about who she was and what your relationship with her was?
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Ocean Vuong
She's my partner's grandmother. I wanted to dedicated the book to her. I wanted to use her name to honor her as a real person, you know. But long story short, after I dropped out of Pace University, I lost housing. Then I applied to Brooklyn College. I got in, but I didn't have a place to live. I was couch surfing that quickly ran out. And I don't. 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, but it was not the way you think. I was a student at Brooklyn College. I had a library, I had a computer. But I would go to sleep in Penn State in the Long island railroad sector underneath Madison Square Gardens. Very warm. And what I would do is I would print out a fake ticket and that would get you into the Red Hat area where it's much more comfortable.
- [26:26]
David Marchese
Sort of a waiting lounge.
- [26:28]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would do that until like 5:30. Then I would wake up and I would take the one and two down to Flatbush, go into the library in the corner and sleep until my first class at 9 or 10 one day. My partner, we were dating at the time and he was living in Queens, but he was going home that day to Long island. And I got To Penn State. He's like, I'm going to Seaford. Where are you going? I was like, I'm here. You know, it was kind of sweet, but very strange in a way. And he was like, oh, my God. You know? And I was like, all right. Well, he's. That's. You know, he was jarred. And we left. I said, I'm just. Sorry. Just whatever. We don't have to talk again. This is really weird. I'll text you. And then the next day, he called me. He says, you know, I talked to my mom, my grandmother. She was actually 84 at the time. She lives in Richmond Hill. She thought she will not go anywhere. You know, she's an immigrant. This is her first American home. She raised two kids there. Her husband's gone. She won't go, but she has some illness. I didn't know. I just thought I was going to help someone take medic med, like, vitamins, you know? And I ended up living there for two and a half years while I was studying and helping take care of her. Take care of her. Yeah. And I mean, I just. I was 20, 21. But what was interesting was that we kind of started like, a family, you know, like. Because I was living in this row house right next to the train. The A train. And then my partner Peter, would start visiting more, and I'm like, are we dating? Are we not? Like, what is happening? I'm living with your grandmother. But it was kind of beautiful in that we didn't name it was what was happening. Yeah. He's like, I think. I'm like, I think we're just together, right? Let's just try it out. And I lived in his mother's childhood room down the hall from her. And it was a foundational experience in my life.
- [28:37]
David Marchese
So you had the experience of being a caregiver for her and I think also for your mom. When your mom was dying from cancer, what did you learn about caregiving? Or what did it teach you? Because I think until we've gone through it, we can look at it almost as, like, a penalty or something that's solely to be endured without any other positive qualities. But what was your experience?
- [29:03]
Ocean Vuong
It certainly requires endurance because you are in a heightened place of selflessness and giving with no determinate end. And so there's a kind of faith of the act itself. Like, I'm like, I'm just gonna be here for as long as it takes. But it's. In a way, it's really sad because it should also be what is possible. Without illness, you know, giving your loved one your best self. But then only in when death nears do we truly do it. Maybe because it's unsustainable otherwise.
- [29:48]
David Marchese
It's not a world away from the idea, you said earlier, of kindness without hope.
- [29:52]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. That's. God, that's good. Because there is no hope. You just want to almost merge with them. Like, when I'm on my mother's deathbed, I said, mom, anything, anything. And often she just. Very poetical, you know, she just kept saying, like, raise me up. And we have this hospice bed. I'm pushing. I'm like, mom, it's the highest it can go. She's like, yeah, but keep raising me up. And I'm like, you know, And I just like. And as a poet, all I can think about is the metaphor. I'm like, raise you up. Where, you know are you going up there? And so it was. It changed everything for me. You know, everyone says that, but I think death becomes. It's just always here.
- [30:40]
David Marchese
Do you think it changed the kind of writer you are?
- [30:46]
Ocean Vuong
I don't know yet. This is the first book I wrote from start to finish without her being alive. And I told myself, like any young writer, that I was this avant garde, counter formalist. And I saw myself on this kind of high horse, and I thought I'd write whatever I want. And I was very proud of that. But I realized after my mother passed that I was actually just trying to do well in the world so that I could take care of my mom. Like, everything was kind of a strategic, right? It's like, oh, I gotta get this job. I gotta be a professor. I gotta get tenure now. I gotta do service work. And I just. To secure my family. Cause, you know, I have one salary, It's a good one. But even now, there's nine Vietnamese refugees who I take care of. It's a blessing. I don't see it as a burden.
- [31:37]
David Marchese
You mean who you support financially?
- [31:39]
Ocean Vuong
I support financially, Yeah. I mean. But I was always strategic. And when my mom died, I was like, that was it. Everything was for her. I have a job, you know, I have a living. And ultimately, I got to ask a question I didn't want to ask yet, but I had to, which was that what would I write for myself? And this is the toughest book I wrote. And not, like formally, but just existentially. It's like, okay, now what? Just write a book to say some things. And I felt that for a long time. And I told my Agent. I said, I think I'm sorry ahead of time. I think this is my slump book. You know, I just.
- [32:19]
David Marchese
New one.
- [32:20]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah, I felt that way, and I still feel that way. I just. Cause I don't know. The culture will decide, you know, But I just felt like, what did you.
- [32:28]
David Marchese
Feel like you weren't accomplishing?
- [32:30]
Ocean Vuong
It wasn't clear to me why anyone should read it, you know, like. And I think that's part of, like, the question of, oh, if I wrote for myself, then I'm like, oh, I don't think anyone should read if I wrote for myself. Whereas if I wrote to support my family, it was very clear, right? It was like, here's a book from a son to a mother who can't read. That's wham. You know, let's go. Take off, right?
- [32:51]
David Marchese
Writing for yourself seemed selfish or hollow.
- [32:55]
Ocean Vuong
It felt just very neutral, you know, it just felt very limp, where I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm excited. It's a creative work. But when I lost that myth, and it is a myth, right. I made that myth up. I made the myth of, like, I need to go. It's that quintessential oldest immigrant son myth. Except that other people said, I'm gonna be a doctor, a lawyer. But I said, I'm gonna be a writer, the best writer I can be, to take care of my family. And I was like. Even as I tried to betray that Asian stereotype of, like, the immigrant making good, and I thought I would be, like, this radical writer, I end up doing it.
- [33:41]
David Marchese
You took a different path, but you did it.
- [33:43]
Ocean Vuong
It was the same thing. It's the same goal. And so when I finally got to do what I thought I was doing this whole time, which is like writing on my own terms, it felt really empty to me. But I'm not. I don't fetishize an identity of writer. To me, this. What we're doing is the same work. My teaching is the same work. When I give a talk at a university in front of people, it's the same thing.
- [34:11]
David Marchese
Well, how do you characterize that work?
- [34:12]
Ocean Vuong
A kind of sincerity of figuring this out. I think that's it. In the Buddhist Sutra, says, engagement, the phenomena of the world with earnestness. And I've always valued that. I just didn't know that our culture often values cynicism as a form of intelligence. And earnestness is kind of frowned upon because it almost means that you've been duped. It's like, oh, you believe in this too much. You clearly haven't Thought deeply about it. Yeah.
- [34:42]
David Marchese
Well, also, it just, you know, for better or worse, it turns out that cynicism wins a lot of the time. Earnestness isn't always rewarded. I know the point is not to be rewarded for earnestness, but it is easy to be skeptical about it when you see how the spoils are divided.
- [35:00]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah. And earnestness and sincerity is over committing. Right. Because you have to go all in. You have to have hope, optimism. But the Senate gets to stay on the neutral line and judge the ones who go forward. So it's an easier position to be in and there's very low risk of it.
- [35:24]
David Marchese
After the break, I talk to Ocean again and he tells me how falling in love with literature was sometimes a wedge between him and his family.
- [35:32]
Ocean Vuong
Where I'm from, reading itself is almost a betrayal. It's a class betrayal. It was kind of seen as like, oh, you're too good for us. You're trying to read to go to college. You're trying too hard to get out.
- [35:58]
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- [36:40]
David Marchese
Hi, Ocean, how are you?
- [36:41]
Ocean Vuong
Hi again. Good to see you.
- [36:43]
David Marchese
Good to see you.
- [36:43]
Ocean Vuong
Glad to talk to you again. I must say, before we start, there is some drilling happening in my New York apartment. So if you hear whining, painful sound, I promise it's not coming from my voice.
- [36:58]
David Marchese
Are you ready for some more light hearted questions about you and your work?
- [37:03]
Ocean Vuong
I'm ready. I'm ready always.
- [37:07]
David Marchese
So I know that your mom had a sense of your accomplishments as a writer. I think, you know, I read maybe an interview you gave or a piece you wrote where you talked about how she came to readings of yours and sort of like enjoyed the fact that a bunch of white people were sitting and listening respectfully to her son. But do you know if anyone ever. I mean, she was illiterate, so do you know if anyone ever read your work to her? Or did she have responses to the content of your work, not just the reception of it?
- [37:40]
Ocean Vuong
No. You know, I tried to kind of like break down a poem for her. I tried to even talk to her about books I want to write. And I think it was hard for her ultimately to be in proximity of my reading and writing because it was almost like I was evidence of what she could have done if she had a normal life untouched by war. And when I realized that very early on, I stopped reading in front of her because it was almost like this mocking. It's like, I'm proud of my son, but, gosh, he's in a world I'll never access. And I. I put the books away after I realized that, because also, where I'm from, reading itself is almost a betrayal. It's a class betrayal. It was kind of seen as like, oh, you're too good for us. You're trying to read to go to college. You're trying too hard to get out. And in the same way, it's like, I remember when I first started reading in high school, I'd go to the library or the lunchroom and read, and I would hide. I would pretend to be asleep. I would put my head down on my hand and put the book in my lap, and it felt so natural, like, oh, yeah, I gotta do. But in retrospect, it was so interesting but deeply sad that it was better for me to perform lethargy and unconsciousness. It was better to perform unconsciousness than to read and be perceived reading. I'm still stunned by that, you know, but it just. That was how you have to do it. If you wanted to read, you had to find a way.
- [39:26]
David Marchese
How do you think becoming more educated and changing your social milieu also affected your relationships with people?
- [39:39]
Ocean Vuong
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 and my aunt. The kind of loneliness of class movement. It takes so long to study and realize what has happened to you, you know, And I think of this in relation to Mark Fisher's work, who writes brilliantly about this as a theorist. He says, like, you know, coming from the working poor and takes decades of learning to realize what happened to you. And by the time you realize it, it's too late. Like, right now, my grandma's dead, my uncle's dead, my mom's dead. You know, it's almost like there's a kind of helplessness to that realization. And so I think I've kind of come to an end of understanding all that, but it feels too late. I think it's a lot of grief. You know, you enter these rooms, and even with my colleagues, they're all lovely. But it's hard to explain what we were talking about in our first interview. Like, I don't. I never say that stuff because I feel like it's gonna stop the room or people are gonna. I just feel like I'm always kind of really alone in these spaces. And then when I come home, no one cares.
- [41:06]
David Marchese
What do you mean, no one cares?
- [41:07]
Ocean Vuong
Like, two years ago, I was bailing out my cousin, like, truly bailing him out in a bail bond office who was having a mental health crisis. It was really bad, and police were being called. And I get a call from my aunt saying it's like 1am come to this 24 hour bail bond. And I go, and I've never bailed anybody out. And I'm like, MacArthur genius. Who cares? New Yorker, who. None of that had any traction. I don't even know how to fill out a bail bond form. And I'm just like, completely lost. Nobody cares what I do. And I think in a way that's refreshing. Like, I don't come home as Ocean Vuong, the writer. I come home as Ocean, the nephew. The cousin. The cousin who's going to bail me out, the cousin who's going to buy my new Yeezys that I saw online, you know, whatever. So it's refreshing. But there's no place that I'm recognized as a person other than, like, my close circle of friends who are also mostly not writers. And, you know, if I were to think about it further, David, like, philosophically, I would maybe even push to say, maybe none of us have a place. You know, like, how. How much are we performing? We talk to our mother differently. We talk to our dean differently. We talk to our friends, our lovers. We're constantly code switching. And one thing I'm interested in as a writer is like, is there a center to me? Is there a center to you? Or are we just a matrix of instances? You know, it gets really heady. But on some days I feel like, all right, I am who I am. And some days I'm like, I think I'm just a series of utterances. But you don't want to go down that route too much. You might have to call your therapist.
- [42:56]
David Marchese
You had said earlier that you financially support nine refugees. These are family members.
- [43:02]
Ocean Vuong
Family members. I mean, technically, they're Vietnamese refugees. That's how we arrived.
- [43:06]
David Marchese
Yeah. Are they worried about their status in the country? Are you worried about it?
- [43:11]
Ocean Vuong
I am, right? I mean, every day has been a nail biter, and I'm in kind of survival mode for them. And I just said, just, please just put your head down. It's so crazy, David, because I've said in the past, I said, our elders put their Heads down, so that the next generation can be known, can do what they want. I don't have to be a doctor or a lawyer. You know, I can be a poet. But here I am, the second generation or the 1.5 or whatever, telling my elders, please put your head down. Please just go to work. Don't get a speeding ticket until further notice. But the suspicion has always been there, you know, of government, of power. And I think this is true with a lot of Vietnamese refugees and refugees in general. In a lot of ways, it hurt us because the suspicion also applied to doctors. You know, my grandmother never wanted to see a doctor until it was too late, and it was stage four. My mother was afraid of doctors, missed her, you know, mammogram appointment by six months. And I said, why did you. You know? She said, oh, I just. I get nervous going in there, you know, even when I go with her. So that applies, that kind of trust in authority. It's a fraught thing, and it's hard to choose how you respond to your trauma.
- [44:42]
David Marchese
Do you think there's any way in which sort of your awareness of the cruelty that you had inside yourself, in your own experience with cruelty, gives you any understanding of the strain of our culture currently, in which cruelty seems like it's almost become fashionable?
- [45:02]
Ocean Vuong
Oh, wow.
- [45:03]
David Marchese
Or there's almost like a performative cruelty that happens in it?
- [45:06]
Ocean Vuong
Yes. Yes. I think I was in a world where anger, rage, and violence was a way to control the environment. And it was a way to control an environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded. You know, like, another memory I had was, I think about this often is just seeing a kid get jumped for the first time. I was maybe 12, 13, and it was a kid called D. Nice. And I remember, like, a group of, like, 15, 20 kids. It was so many of all ages. And they went up behind him, pulled his shirt over his head, and then they just went in, just a flurry of fists. But I think because so much of that was close to me, I always had to look at it, and it behooved me to understand it in order to survive. So when I see cruelty, I look closer and I say, where is this coming from? And a lot of times it comes from fear and vulnerability. You know, you're too scared and you have to strike first, which is a.
- [46:15]
David Marchese
Form of controlling the situation.
- [46:16]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah. And so, 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. And it's interesting, you see the doorway in front of you and it feels so immense. It feels like the only path. But when you step back, if I can borrow a metaphor here, it's almost like the doorway is in the middle of a field and you're like, oh, my goodness, I can step back and I can just take one step to the side and go around and the whole world is before me. And there was a threshold in front of me that I could always pass through after that day with Big Joe. And in a way, my career so far has been a slow attempt at stepping back and stepping aside from that door.
- [47:07]
David Marchese
I. I was curious. Did you ever get your stolen bike back?
- [47:12]
Ocean Vuong
I didn't get it back to get my. My bonus, but I didn't make it to work. You know, I still think about the feeling of that, and I just think, why did I rage out that day? And I think it was just that all that hope was robbed from me, you know, like that. I think that was what it was, is that I felt entitled to that bonus. And when someone else took that out of me, I think I lost sense of control. And I. I think about that like you have these epiphanies when control. When you're just. You're kind of in a helpless state.
- [47:52]
David Marchese
You brought up the concept of satori a couple times.
- [47:56]
Ocean Vuong
Yeah.
- [47:57]
David Marchese
Have you had any epiphanic moments of satori recently?
- [48:05]
Ocean Vuong
I have this particular one, and I didn't. I just felt. I felt kind of crazy. But I start asking my friends about it, and a lot of them actually share it. And it's usually in the middle of the night. I can't sleep. I wake up in a kind of terror. It's almost like this moment before a true awareness arrives. There's about like a 15 second window of, oh, my God, what is all this? And what fills that is this kind of horror that none of it matters. We're all going to die. Why am I here? Why am I sitting in this apartment scribbling away when I should be trying to be a better partner? I want to apologize to everybody I've ever known. I want to redeem myself for everything. And I'm going to commit my life to trying to heal and help everybody I love. And that lasts maybe like three minutes. And then I pick up my phone and scroll on something, and then the culture just supplants at all, right? And so the trick of Satari is to commit that realization into action. And I have a lot of trouble in the second assignment. But that strange existential horror, I think maybe because when my mother was on her deathbed, she says, son, now that you know how painful this is, you have to go and help people. And it was like a mandate. But I just thought, gosh, here's a woman taking her last breath. You know, she's not like, I don't want to romanticize her and make her some sort of martyr, but where did that come from? You know, this idea that you have to then tell your son to go help people. You know, here we go again. You know, I just, like, I'm still trying to find out all the ways that I could do that. You can't just make your art for yourself in a vacuum. I mean, there's diaries and journals for that. Nothing wrong with that. But when you make art to share, you have to think, how can I be amongst people? You know, my favorite theorist, Trinh T. Minhao, said it best where she said, I do not write about. I write beside. Gosh, that's so perfect. If I could do that my whole life, I would. I would have a successful life as an artist. Regardless of what happens is I never think I'm writing about something. I don't want to, like, render the people around me into a meaningful nugget. I want to just scribble alongside that feels truer.
- [51:00]
David Marchese
That's Ocean Vuong. His new book, the Emperor of Gladness, will be published on May 13. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme and Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Sophia Landman, original music by Rowan Nimisto and Marion Lozano, photography by Philip Montgomery. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew. Our executive producer is Alison Benedikt. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Mattie Masiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schuman and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to the Interview. Wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com theinterview and you can email us anytime at the interview Interview at nytimes. Com. I'm David Marchese, and this is the interview from the New York Times.