Editor's note: This interview is a compilation of an in-studio conversation and a live event.
Novelist Ocean Vuong is one of the most celebrated authors of his generation. He's won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, and his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is a pick for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. Still, he says, his large Vietnamese American family is nonplussed by his success.
"When I come home, I'm just one more of the litter," Vuong says. "Why should they care? Just because The New Yorker says what I do is valuable. ... Why should all of a sudden that value system be foisted on them?"
Born in Vietnam, Vuong emigrated to the U.S. as a child. He grew up in Hartford, Conn., raised by a mother who worked in a nail salon and a stepfather who worked at a manufacturing plant. He borrows from his own working-class roots in The Emperor of Gladness.
The novel is set in the fictional post-industrial town of East Gladness, Conn., and follows a 19-year-old Vietnamese American man named Hai who contemplates taking his own life. But Hai's plan to kill himself is interrupted by an 82-year-old widow with dementia, who persuades him to become her caregiver.
Vuong notes that this is the first book he's written, from start to finish, since his mother's death in 2019. He says writing it was a "way out of grief" — and a way to honor her memory.
"My mother's language is now inside me," he says. "She left me her thinking. And I find myself thinking the way she did, even times when I disagree with her, when she was alive. ... I look at the world sometimes, looking at things, and I say, 'Gosh, that's what my mom thinks.' Now I think that."
Interview highlights
On different versions of the American dream
All I saw was stagnation in American life. But it didn't mean that it was doomed. My stepdad worked at ... a company in Connecticut. It's no longer there. He worked there for 25 years. And its entire manufacturing [operation] was to manufacture a single screw that went into gas pumps. If you asked him, a refugee who escaped by boat, ... "Did you manage to live your American life the way you wanted?" 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." ... He would hang that uniform every single day. And he said, "I live my life on my terms. That was my American life that I wanted." He had healthcare. He had a salary.
It's very relative for me because when I looked at his life, I saw something full of loss. This man ... woke up at 3 p.m. to go to work, went to bed at 12 a.m., 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 triumph, 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.
On the generosity he experienced growing up in poor communities
We're told in this country that you have to pull yourself from the bootstraps, everybody for himself, 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 it's mostly upper-middle-class folks — academia, publishing — and I found, like, a totally different set of ethics and values, and that ricochet, I was never prepared for, I'm still not prepared for it.
On why he doesn't read in front of his family
When I start to read in front of them, everybody goes silent. … Because they're illiterate, they have so much reverence for it. As if I'm performing some kind of liturgy or magic, right? And that saddens me. And it was like, "Everyone, Ocean's reading," as if I am doing something like a wizard. My mother … when she was dying, … 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." ... You always thought that you look up to your mom and I did not know she was looking up to me the whole time. But she was so proud to say that.
On his plan to stop publishing after his eighth book
It's eight, after the Eightfold Path in Buddhism, which is the path the Buddha laid out for liberation from suffering in this realm. So it's a number that is auspicious to me. When I was a very young writer, 21, 22, I came home one day and I was listening to an NPR piece ... and it was my hero on NPR. It was Annie Dillard … [and] she says, "I'm here to tell you that I'm retiring. ... I woke up one morning, went to my desk, and realized I've done everything I set out to do as a writer, and the writer label does not define me, and I have more life to live, but I am done because I did my work on my terms." ... And I was so amazed by that, I thought, gosh, that's what I want.
On teaching writing at New York University
My students who are in their 20s, bless their hearts, their entire political consciousness is this administration. And I don't know what it's like to grow up into this country seeing the people you love being torn down. I was spared that, being a little older than them, but they are so steadfast. On the worst days, I go into the class and they're watching the poem come together in the brief 10, 20 minutes we have per poem. I'm risen to the cause that the stakes — their stakes — bring me. And I always say that the greatest cure for me of depression is being a teacher. It really is. …
I just wrapped up my 11th year teaching. It's the honor of my life to be a teacher. I see myself more as a teacher than a writer. To me, the books are more like performances. They're singular things.
Thea Chaloner and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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