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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And we all feel good and cathartic and we go home. But I wanted to commit a life to be saved at the beginning. When you step away from that ledge, you still don't have hope. You still don't have the answers. Your life is still in shambles. How do you go on from there? And the culture tells us that we have to go out and find the reason to live. And in this scene, he lives because he forgets to die.
He's, you know, this woman's losing her laundry. And he's like, hey, your sheets. And he forgets. And I think to me, that little gesture is actually how a lot of life works. You know, when my uncle... He had a note, and I'll just paraphrase it. There's a lot said there that I will not share, but there's one that I think is really useful to share.
And you would think that we want the big reasons to step out of this world. But his reason was very, very small and maybe even ambivalent. Where he said, I just had enough. I'm so sorry. I had enough. As if he was pushing back a second plate. It was this small gesture. And for me, coming from the working poor, I understood it, but I wonder if the larger culture who doesn't experience that know.
Because what he was saying is, I'm tired. And so similarly, I had this character also ambivalently choose. He doesn't plan it. He walks across the bridge and he says, gosh, I think I'm tired enough to give this a try. And he comes back because he forgets the assignment because somebody is in more distress.
And sometimes we come back to life not because we found a reason to live, but because we realize we're more useful to somebody else than we ever were to ourselves. And that's a good enough reason.
Particularly in the Tibetan tradition, I am a Buddhist practitioner of all traditions. I practice along the lines of Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen practice, but I embrace all. And death meditation is really important for the tantric tradition in Tibetan Buddhism.
And there's even something called a sky burial, wherein when someone dies, the corpse is brought to a mountain in Tibet, now Nepal, and they're wrapped, the body is wrapped in rags, and someone comes along to then butcher the body. And it's sprinkled on top, the pieces, with flour. And then the vultures come. And that's called a sky burial. It's the final offering of yourself back to the world.
It's the last gesture. of generosity, giving the body back to nature, and also forgetting this whole thing was always an illusion, right? This whole thing will decay. And so it's both for the living, but it's also the wish of the dead. And that sounds very morbid, maybe even horrific, but in the Buddhist tradition, thinking and meditating on death
brings the propulsion of life forward because there's nothing and what what I do usually I sit and I do my breathing and I start to just think about the death that I've experienced in my life with my loved ones and also my own death where I will go where this body will go and so the death meditation
When you're having a bad day, when you're getting a bad email from work, the arguments, the petty things we argue with our loved ones, you do the deaf meditation, you say, ah, that's the only truth. And then all those petty things become so small. I stood up from that deaf meditation and I just said, Gosh, why was I ever upset in the first place? How could I have lose track of myself?
I have good days and bad days with it. There are times I sit up and I said, that email is still messed up. Right? Okay. I'm sitting there thinking about a coffin, and my mind is like, I need to write the essay email. That's 5,000 words that denies all rebuttals. And that needs to put an end to it. This email is going to be the lid of the coffin. Right.
So you try your best, but, you know, but that's my North Star, you know, to kind of move towards that.
I think I'm going to think about that question for the rest of my life. It's interesting because my mother's language is now inside me after she left. She left me her thinking. And I find myself thinking the way she did. In even times when I disagree with her when she was alive, now I think like her. I'm judging like her.
I look at the world sometimes, looking at things, and I say, guys, that's what my mom thinks. Now I think that. And I think they're very porous when they go. They actually leave so much of themselves behind. And for me, the utmost honor that I don't think I can even escape or choose to turn away from is to do this work with immense care and gratitude. I get to try. That's my profession.
How many people do we know, you and I, growing up, working poor, get to try at no cost? When my mother gets the nail wrong, she needs to stay the extra 40 minutes at no extra pay. My stepdad spent 25 years making a screw that goes into gas pumps. If he makes it wrong, that's docking off his pay. The people who brought us here, their second chances were so expensive that they couldn't afford it.
And I get to sit here over a page and try and fail and try again. And so to me, there is no draft that is too much. And I think for me, when I sit down to write or when I teach, I think, gosh, I need to honor them by enjoying the work I get to do. even when it's hard, because we love to complain about work in this country, and this country is work.
This book is all about labor, and we're justified in that. To me, nothing's ever too sacred to say that even at its worst, I get to work. And not only get to work, I get to work on my own terms.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, why? 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 in my, I think, 21, 22, I came home one day, and I was listening to an NPR piece come home from school, and it was my hero on NPR. It was Annie Dillard.
And immediately I said, uh-oh, she's got a new book out. Let's go. Let's go. You know? Take my money. And my ears perked up. And it was, I think, one of the most memorable early radio moments because immediately she says, I'm here to tell you that I'm retiring. And the interviewer was kind of taken aback.
And in a very delicate way, the interviewer was basically saying, well, what's wrong with you? Are you losing your mind? Are you ill? And Dillard said, no. 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.
Showing 901–920 of 1,158 · page 46 of 58
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