Ocean Vuong
speaker
1,158 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 26 Jan
Ocean Vuong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 reddened dawn, one hand in their pocket, the other gripping a cup of Dunkin' Donuts.
they 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 up 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.
Yeah, yeah. And it's so seldom written about. I think 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. And all I saw was stagnation in American life. But it didn't mean that it was doomed. If you ask, my stepdad worked at Standardine. What is Standardine? Standardine 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 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. 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 have to ask permission. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. You can't paint. You don't own anything.
So we lived in a kind of, it felt 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 lived my life on my term. That was my American life that I wanted. He had health care. 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 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 dreams.
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.
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.
And everybody knew that. But we didn't dare say it.
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 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 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 her ride. It was her aunt supposed to pick her up every day. And she's like, I got to go.
You got to stay there until I figure this out. And this is the early aughts. So our community 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?
That's it.
Showing 861–880 of 1,158 · page 44 of 58
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