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
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 it's 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.
It is. But I prefer that they don't care. Oh, say more on that. Yeah. Because when I come home, 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 8 a.m., 8 p.m. If somebody walks in at 7.55, she has to do their nails. She's not leaving until 9.00. 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 don't, because some authors, their work comes home with them. And I can't even bring it home because nobody cares. Like, oh, book, cool. Put it, you know, put it aside. You know, fry, dye, lay it aside, you know.
Extended family. And they're really proud. They, you know, my aunt actually. She has a little album of all of my press cuttings. And she puts it under her desk at the nail salon. She whips it out. She doesn't think anyone will believe her. It's also interesting.
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 Ocean Vuong. I think also like... You know, my aunt was the first one that told me. She says, I was talking about Oprah, and my nephew's an Oprah pick at the salon. And all the people at the salon, they start 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.
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, everybody goes silent.
I'm just reading a magazine in the corner in front of my family. Everything 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, 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. Hmm. 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, shit. Because, and she, 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, and I just thought, gosh.
You know, but she was so proud to say that.
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 will degrade and fall apart.
But mentally, spiritually, I feel invincible because that's the only thing I care about, their blessings.
It was deeply important to me. I lost my uncle in 2012 to suicide. He was 28, I was 24, so he's really a brother. We were both born in Vietnam. We went through the refugee camps together. My first memory in my life ever is sitting on the curb in Hartford with him eating red sour belts.
And we got it from a corner store, a candy store, where probably the last one that was ever like this, where there was giant glass jars of candy, and the man took it out and weighed it. Sounds like something from 60 years ago. But that's my first memory on this earth. And when someone stepped away from the ledge... Everybody claps in the news segments, in the films, in the stories.
And I always wonder, are they clapping for the person? Or are they clapping because society has been restored? Because for that person, they have stepped away from the ledge into a corner. At the heart of it, suicide is still an act of hope. One does it in the hopes of ending immense suffering.
So I've always wondered what day two was like for someone who decides, God willing, to step back to life. And it was never a question I got to ask my uncle because he went through with it. So to me, fiction is a fantastical second chance to launch questions that you never got to ask in life. And I knew that often at the end of the story is where a life is saved, traditionally.
Showing 881–900 of 1,158 · page 45 of 58
← Previous
Next →