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 I tell you, like anybody else, I was told the writer's worth is their corpus, is what they can keep achieving and filling the world with endlessly. And I was so amazed by that. I thought, gosh, that's what I want. I want that feeling, to be able to write with such care and such sincerity. Because Dillard is a sincere writer, right?
She's, when you read her work, you know you are looking over her shoulder as she digs for something she doesn't understand. And I said, I want to be able to wake up one day and look at what I've done and know that I've done it with such care that I can stop well. To hear someone, my hero, say, I'm trying to end well, and I did.
Well, one of my favorite poets is Reginald Shepard. He passed away in 2008. He's a brilliant poet. He wrote this beautiful book on black poetics called Orpheus in the Bronx. If there's one book you read this year, please read Reginald Shepard's Orpheus in the Bronx.
He grew up with welfare, his mother passed away, grew up in the Bronx, went to Brown, went to Iowa, and he made the word taken wherever he wanted to go. A huge hero of mine. Reginald said something really brilliant in Orpheus in the Bronx, where he says, identity is not finite. It is organic and growing.
He's talking specifically about blackness, but you can match it and map it onto anything else. He said, why do we believe blackness is over, that I have to then translate this rock into the culture that makes it understandable for whiteness?
What if instead it's this on-growing nebulous spore that's constantly moving and any given day I don't know what blackness is but I'm moving towards it as it's moving through me. And it just blew my mind. I said, that's it. I don't know what is at the center of me. There are the labels that the culture gives, queer, Asian American, working class, okay.
But those labels also erase us as much as they name us. The first thing colonizers do is they categorize things. Categorization becomes a method, the first, the predecessor for subjugation. And so I like this idea that the true me is unknown even to me, and the work becomes like a photograph. There's a fountain in us, and it's always moving, and the work just captures it in time.
Maybe it's something about being Asian American, being queer. Maybe there's something else. but there is a kind of desire to not be captured. Why that is, I don't know, but I think that I don't really want to be known. I don't want to be transparent. So the books become bait, in a way, so that I can move elsewhere.
Yeah, I see it as a reincarnation, as a Buddhist. My books are not temporal sequences, but they are reincarnations of myself. And that's kind of a faux pas in Western values. You're supposed to reinvent yourself entirely. But where is that true? You and I are here because of the ancestors, the DNA, the memory, the features of everyone who made us. And I don't see anything different in a book
But I don't approach any identity, least of all Asian American identity, as something I know. I approach it as something I'm discovering.
I just wrapped up my 11th year teaching, and 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. I've never signed a multi-book contract. It's one contract per book. You know, my family would prefer.
Yeah, tell that to my brother when he has some new Yeezys or whatever you call them, you know. You get more money with more books, but I'm not in the business of selling ghosts. And so one book at a time. So what I realized, you know, when we talk about the white gaze or white audience, I've learned through my experience, I've been doing this 15 years now,
That what we really mean is the elitist gatekeepers, institutions that believe in their power, occupied by white folks. But we have to also dismantle whiteness down to its granular nature. othernesses in the same way we have to dismantle the stereotypes on people of color. The project is two-pronged. And as a teacher, I pride myself on educating every student in my class. That is my job.
It is sacred to me. And I found this new generation of white students coming to me and said, Professor, we are there. We are on the front lines. We are sick of this. How do I write so that my sentence holds all bodies with respect? Because I can't get it from Faulkner. I can't get it from Hemingway. And the office hour is like a confessional booth. It gets real. It gets real. We get real.
And I said, you are correct. The Mount Rushmore that you were given have failed you in this regard. So you will now have to do what so many writers of color have done. You now have to be the first. But you're luckier. You are still richer. for having come so late, because Morrison did not have a Toni Morrison when she was writing Beloved, but you do.
The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · 13 May 2025
podcast
I have to say I was raised by women who were illiterate. And I think about this often. Where does it come from? I think even though they were illiterate, they were the first poets because they saw that when they came to this country with nothing, they realized that with language, they can make anything happen.
Sometimes it's just us three. Me, you and her. On slow days, I would answer the phone at the nail salon and, you know, she would be there working. And what's so interesting was that when you called me. This is Oprah. How are you? What? This is Oprah. How are you? I recognized the voice right away. I just didn't believe that you were talking to me for any real reason.
But when I heard your voice, I said, this is the voice I heard all my life at four o'clock when I answered the phone. And, you know, I wanted to tell you this, that your voice was a kind of Mediation for all of these women in the nail salon, both the workers and the people who went there to get their nails done.
Because I saw them when they came in with their husbands and the husband will wait for a while and then they will leave. And after a while, it will just be all women. And I found that their voices changed. with your voice among them. And as a child, it was so interesting to hear speech. Everyone talking differently. They were more vulnerable. They were more open with each other.
And I got to see my mother kind of use the show as a way to open up for herself and to learn the language. She would not always understand what was happening, but she would have this little trick where every time there was like an inflected moment in the show with your voice, my mother would...
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