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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · 13 May 2025 podcast

work on a client she'd go oh boy and then the client would it always works you could any given time you could just say oh boy and then the client would say hey isn't that right and then she would learn what was happening from them because her voice her head is down she couldn't hear it

But I saw this kind of town square that your voice created and the themes and what was really touching for me, and I didn't understand at that time, for a community that I grew up in, working poor, immigrants, Reading was very intimidating. We didn't step into bookstores or libraries. It felt like an impenetrable world that was not for us.

And it was aligned with elitism and power and institutions and higher learning that we thought that ship has sailed for us. But when you held up the books in your show, my mother recognized that and says, This is accessible. You're making the act of reading both accessibly dignified, but also fruitful for people who are outside of these realms of institutional elitism.

And I saw the women talk about books in your show. And then they would walk across the Barnes & Noble, across the mall, and they would have language. And they would come in and they would say, this is the book I want. I know how to talk about it. And there's a kind of dignified confidence to literacy. Oh.

And I don't know if anyone has talked about that, but I think that was the major byproduct that your show did is that it made working class people who don't have access to centers of knowledge. They don't get to be in a classroom and have high philosophy around craft or what have you. They get to participate in the vehicle of culture and you make culture legible to them.

who often don't have that chance. So I just want to say thank you so much for that.

And we came up in Vietnam as rice farmers.

I was the first to go to college, the first to read. And we've been rice farmers very happily for hundreds of years. It was the war that ejected us from that idyllic world into this one. And so by geopolitical violence and accident, I'm now a professor in a way. But she knew that in this country, the sentence will be the medium that can make us change and change our lives.

She didn't understand it, but she knew it was powerful. So she would drop me off before her shift at the nail salon, at the public library. And she gave me this mandate. And she said, you go in there and you read everything, especially what you don't understand. Wow. And it's so interesting because that's what I give my students now. I said, you have to move towards the unknown, the mystery.

The condition of not knowing is the first step of knowledge.

Don't be afraid of not knowing. You owe it to yourself to go to the root of the mystery. And that is to work not only a pedagogy of an education, but also of life. It goes beyond books.

Yeah. You know, America has often been founded on the idea of the nuclear family. And one antidote to that might be the found family. But I actually think when we look at the history of our culture, it's the circumstantial family. founded around labor.

And so when I worked at Boston Market as a teenager, I found that it was actually the relationships that you had with people you don't choose, people who are cobbled together, working through a shift, and you start to know their footsteps. you start to feel the cologne they wear, the gum, and when that gum will expire. You can hear how they cough, how they talk.

And the intimacy that comes from the circumstantial labor cobbled together is actually the foundation of so much of our country. So much of it is founded on labor, loneliness, and love in the midst of all that.

Well, I think when I was a fiction student, we were told, going back to Aristotle, that the greatest work of fiction usually has a reversal of fate. You have to change at the end to bring the audience a kind of catharsis. Rags to riches. He gets the girl. The girl gets the guy. You're going to find the body. You'll find the murderer.

So it works in a very commercial way that there's a promise of catharsis. There's a kind of deliverable.

And it works in the same way when you buy a car or a home or a washing machine. And I thought, and yet... American life as I saw it growing up as an immigrant in this country didn't work like that. My aunt works at FedEx for almost 40 years. My brother works at Dick's Sporting Goods for 15 years. The people who I love, they work the same jobs. They drive the same car.

They live in the same homes for 20, 30 years. Some of them don't get raises. Some of them don't move up. And yet their lives are not worthless. It's not like their lives are not... Meaningful. Meaningful. Yeah. You know, and there was this... When I was trying to learn how to be a writer, everyone said, you have to change, you have to improve.

And meanwhile, American life, as I saw it, wasn't improving. But it doesn't mean that these people didn't have lives full of dignity.

Yeah, yeah. I hope I changed it just enough not to have to hire a lawyer. But I worked there for two years. I worked at Panera Bread as well. And what I found was that It's easy to be kind when you have so much to give, when you have so much means, you have so much wealth. It's easy to give when your life doesn't change, when you can give so much. And it's a beautiful thing.

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