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

That's right. That's right. And what is it? Kindness without hope. When you don't have hope that the kindness will drastically change anyone's life and yet you still give it. That has always fascinated me, even as a child. You know, we are a culture that fetishizes talent. Athletic talent, musical talent, writing talent.

But I wonder what would happen if we had prodigies of kindness, if we can celebrate children when we tap into this innate kindness. And I saw that at the home market, at the Boston markets, at the Panera Breads, where people are always... When there's so little they can do to affect change, they still go out of their way. They don't get paid extra. They don't get anything extra.

And yet it's the moments after the shifts, having the cigarettes, after being slammed, people being diagnosed with cancer in the middle of the shifts, getting on the phone calls.

In my time at Boston Market, that I'll still, I think I'll, it's been almost 20 years and it's still in my head. And it'll probably be in my head until I die. I didn't put it in the book because it's too dramatic. You know, sometimes as an author, you said life is more dramatic than fiction can allow, you know, be too, too pressurized. But I was being trained early on. by this man named Ruben.

He was in his 50s and he was training me. And the first thing he taught me was how to eat a spinach croissant in under 30 seconds. He says, if you're hungry, you don't have to take a break. You can slip two croissants in your apron and then you can go into the freezer because nobody goes into the freezer. You can't go into the bathroom because a customer might see you.

That's really odd to see someone eating a croissant. And then the next hour later, we're cleaning out the freezer. And there's something that's so peculiar with what I was talking about with circumstantial family. We have our backs to each other. I'm 19 years old. We're cleaning the freezer. And we're talking about family. We're talking, oh, you have a brother, what have you.

And to this day, I'm haunted by what happened because he's talking about his sons. And he just says something. He says, you know, I can't tell my wife this. And I thought, oh, my God. You know, like, am I going to hear a crime of God or a crime of the law? Yeah. He says, I have three sons, but I only love one of them. Wow. And I'm 19.

I don't know what to say other than give an affirmative kind of like, uh-huh. You know, like, I just don't know what it meant. Uh-huh. And he says, you know, there's no true connection I have with Jake. There's no reason for this. And the others do good by me. I do good by them. But I'm coming to realize it's such a strange thing that I only love one of them. Do you ever feel that?

And I said, I don't know. I don't know. I'm 19. Yeah. Yeah. But I think there's something about labor. There's enough anonymity. He knows that when we clock out at 6 p.m., I'll never see him until the next shift. I don't know where he lives. I don't know his sons.

And there's something really unique about modern life and maybe all of life where that kind of laborious intimacy allows us to say things we won't even say to our priests, our loved ones, our family, our best friends, because there's no judgment.

I thank you for sharing that story.

I don't know why. I still think about that, and I don't understand it, but I just knew that I was receiving something really vulnerable.

When I was a younger writer, I thought you had to fill the page or else nothing happens. But the more I work at this, the more I realize that writing is about listening to the world. You're collaborating with the world. You don't shut it away and go into your little desk or your cave and create genius work. It doesn't work like that. Ultimately, nobody writes a good sentence by accident.

It comes with care. You have to really care for the world. And every author's book is multiple drafts, means it comes out of tireless care, obsession, worry. And when you hold up anyone's book, you're getting their best self. And the best self for me comes from really engaging with the world without judgment and really being interested in people. At the end of the day,

All I would say is that as an author, I'm just really interested in human beings. That's it. Everything else is craft. You can learn that. You'll find a way to get that. But what you can't learn is a deep investment in compassionate watching and listening of our species.

I get one draft at Life, and I usually mess it up, but High got 12 drafts, so... He's a little more refined.

I think at the heart of every writer, you have to really love the world, even when it's difficult to love. And I think description... is autobiographical in that when you describe something, you're giving it a point of view. How you describe something, how you see something says a lot about yourself. And I think I saw all these people in my life and I never heard anyone write about them.

And I said, if the sentence can pin life to the page, I want to pin these people who never got to get out. You know, we fetishize these heroes' journey about getting out of this town, And it's a very cathartic one. We love these stories. We want to feel that everyone can get out. But the majority of people can't. And won't. And won't. And sometimes by choice.

Sometimes they have to stay and take care of elders who are ill. They have jobs they can't leave. And I just didn't see the literary world right about people who had to stay. Because that's actually much more interesting to me. It's easy to go to the big city... And have a different life. It's much harder but more interesting to ask yourself, how do I make do without escape?

That becomes an existential question. How do I make do in this body if I can't leave it? The book starts with a young man deciding to jump off a bridge. Yeah. And he's stopped by an elderly widow doing laundry. And it's a personal experience. Crux for me, because when I was a teenager, one of my best friends took his own life with a gun. He was 16. My uncle at 28 took his own life.

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