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Ocean Vuong On Asking Questions Without Answers

The bestselling author of 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' discusses his latest novel, 'The Emperor of Gladness,' now out in paperback, along with class, the anxiety of reinvention and who gets to be a legitimate liar in America.

The world demands definition, certainty and arcs of triumph, yet best-selling writer and professor Ocean Vuong offers something very different. His novels and poetry catapult readers into the ineffable, often jolting them into unprecedented perspectives. He employs metaphors that disrupt thought and open the heart, drawing us into the lives of the working poor, the people upward mobility would rather not think about. He stays with an image or a feeling and asks, “What else?” In Vuong’s most recent book, The Emperor of Gladness, he writes about the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut: “We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.”

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Vuong came to the U.S. at two, learned to read English at 11, was the go-between translator for his mother and grandmother—women who filled him with tenderness and the hauntings of the Vietnam War—and has become one of the most celebrated authors of his generation. His trajectory is the redemption story America loves, and yet, he questions the very crown he wears. “I’m still perplexed as to why the works have taken off in the way they do,” he reflects. “To me it’s all like niche material—gay, sad descriptions of New England weather. Why are there millions of copies across the world… I’m glad, but I don’t know why.”

Perhaps because as much as people crave certitude and answers, it’s the questions that make us feel alive. Vuong is the author of two poetry collections and two novels. His debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the T.S. Eliot Prize, among others, and Time Is a Mother was a Griffin Prize finalist. He is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant. His first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a New York Times best-seller, has sold over two million copies in 41 languages. His newest, The Emperor of Gladness, is an Oprah’s Book Club pick, a finalist for the Dublin Literary Award and is out in paperback now.

The Emperor of Gladness follows 19-year-old Hai, a college dropout struggling with addiction, who stands at the edge of a bridge, ready to jump, when he’s distracted by an old woman wrestling with a laundry line. When the wind takes a bedsheet, he calls out and gives himself away. Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant still plagued by World War II with bouts of dementia, talks him down and takes him in. She offers Hai a room in exchange for his caretaking, and the two form an unlikely bond. With a second chance at life, he gets a job at HomeMarket, a fast-casual restaurant, where he meets a cast of quirky characters he laughs with and roots for, all of them just barely getting by.

I met Vuong this spring at the National Poetry Series dinner at Balthazar, where he was one of the readers. I was seated at a long banquette, flanked by writers, although there was an empty seat next to me. When Vuong popped up from under the table, I felt like I’d won the lottery. We had a wonderful conversation, which we’d pick up a month later over Zoom. I had spent days immersed in his writing. So when he appeared on screen, I found myself tearing up. I apologized.

He replied: “That’s what it’s about. The culture fetishizes this steely, objective thing. But nothing is objective. No journalism is objective. Joan Didion was so radical in proving that. She’s like, ‘I’m a small woman in a room looking at the world, and that needs to be understood.’ So much of my work is about that. I’m grateful for your experience and for opening with this vulnerability. Why fake anything? Everyone gives us a form to present ourselves in. That’s the easy way. It’s always available. Who has the courage to break from that model?

Thank you. You’ve talked about being drawn to the threshold, the moment between the rose and the bud, the in-between that we’ve been taught to ignore, because it has no name. How do you write toward that?

I don’t know when I realized this. Maybe it was my study of Zen Buddhism, where there were these Zen koans that would say things like, “The grass is not green”… “An elephant is only big when it’s next to something small.” What those koans do is destabilize definition. When you look at words, which we use as signs, literally signs to get us places, everything in between the bud and the rose lasts much longer. And yet, we don’t care to have a name for it. So much of life is like that. We say childhood, adolescence, adulthood. But is it just that simple? So much of that time was defined as one word, childhood. But what is grieving inside that space? Experience is infinite and words are finite.

The tension is how do I use finite material to capture the infinite? It shouldn’t be possible. I think it’s about being skeptical of the words, which is a strange thing for a poetry professor to say. But is the word enough? You’re given childhood and adulthood, but is that enough? For most people, that’s fine. That’s serviceable. Let’s move on. Let’s get a job. Let’s do things. But the writer would say, “I don’t think that’s enough.” I don’t think the dictionary has two poles there. I’m insistent that there’s so much in the middle. And then the task is to pay attention to that, to be present to that, and ask, “What else? What else is there?” And when you lean in, you think, “Oh gosh, there’s no definition for this thing between.” But it’s incredible. Look at the rose. Look at it. It’s not even rose-like anymore. It’s self-destructing into rose. How do I describe that?

You have so many beautiful metaphors in your work. You juxtapose life and death, and you almost feel them simultaneously. How do you construct that? What’s your process?

I think metaphor is one of the oldest forms of thinking. That’s what I insist on, that it’s not just writing, it’s thinking. You can look at a building and see a gravestone. “Whoa.”

So I think, do you have enough courage to make the jump and........

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