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 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

And usually when we talk about suicide, it's usually like, oh, they struggled, but then they didn't do it. And that's triumphant. Great. Well, actually, what I'm more interested in is like, how do you live And go on in the aftermath of that decision. If you decide to end your life and then ultimately decide not to, what's day two look like? What's day three look like?

What's the aftermath of living and deciding to live and have the will to live without the hope of living? And I wanted to know that of my uncle because I didn't get that from him. So I think I write in order to understand that, you know, what if he got to have an aftermath where he's still alive? What would that life look like?

That seemed like a much more interesting place to write a book from rather than to say, oh, well, they didn't do it. End of story. Everyone clap.

Oh, I felt, you know, on one hand, they're very different. He's 19. She's 84.

Yeah. It's a long, convoluted story. But Grazina is the grandmother of my partner. And when I was in college, I dropped out of business school. I lost my housing, lost my tuition. And I was casually dating my partner, Peter. And he was in law school. And we were kids. And I said, I'm kind of homeless, but I want to go to school and study English. And he said, one day he called me.

I talked to my mom. My grandma lives alone. She's very independent. She wants to stay in the house that she lived in after fleeing Stalin, fleeing World War II. She's a self-made person, a refugee like myself. And you can live with her and go to school. And so I lived with her for three years.

And we had this incredible bond that then led to my partner and I's relationship blooming because it's this kind of strange quintessential American family. He would visit from school, but I would live with her every day. And here we are, two refugees from two different wars, two different continents, 20 years apart. And we are in Brooklyn. living probably the most American life I can think of.

It's not the white picket fence American life, but it's still true. And that reciprocal care, I had to care for her as she looked out for me. And I was so inspired by this because I think Both the very young and the very old are on the margins of society. They're no longer in the center. The young are said, oh, you don't know enough. You don't have enough. You don't own enough to contribute.

You don't have a degree. You don't have the credentials. In the old, you're defunct. You're out of the market. You're in the retirement. Push yourself away. And so both the young and the very old, in my observation in this country... live in a perennial loneliness.

And when they get together, you realize there's actually a lot of common ground when people have been pushed to the center. I wanted to write a book where the people who were pushed to the absolute fringes of society get to occupy the center and the camera would just not pan away. I did not want a plot that solved them. I did not want anyone to get a better job. to have a better home.

There's no improvement. It's just life and it's kindness without hope, which is kindness at the highest cost. And yet we all know people every day who are kind and gracious and good to each other despite all of that. Kindness without any hope of return. That's just something I'm so fascinated in.

Well, in a sense, you know, the idea of YOLO, you only live once, has been really destructive to our world. You know, corporations think they only have one life to harvest. the most profit out of the environment and therefore harm the environment. You know, we're told again and again, no regrets, just seize the day. And it's very self-centered in a way.

But I think another way to think about you only live once is what if you only have one chance to live with care? consideration, a sense of obligation to each other. And it's not even like this, you know, goodie, woo-woo selflessness, but it actually makes your life much better when you live with the obligation that you owe each other everything.

both strangers and family and your environment and your community. And so I wanted to just change the meaning of YOLO. And as a poet, I love that one phrase could have double meaning. You can approach it that if you only have one life, what if you didn't just grab everything you can in the candy store, leaving it a total catastrophe in your wake?

But what if you did it so that other people can also inhabit that space and you can improve it? And, you know, our culture often thinks that's silly, that's childish, right? It's too wholesome and earnest. But I think earnestness is an incredible, courageous thing. I respect it immensely in the people I meet and the students I have. If you're earnest and sincere...

It's the most greatest truth because it means that you're willing to risk vulnerability and ridicule. You're willing to be wrong and come off silly because you believe in everything. I think it's okay to believe in everything. It's okay to believe that. If you have this one life, you should try to make it better for other people. Children just have that. It's not a question to them.

But as you get older, we start to be more fearful of that because we think that if I believe in goodness too much, then I've fallen for something. I've been duped. I've been stymied into believing goodness. And sometimes it's really hard. There are days where I can't do it. But that's my North Star.

And that's why I started the book with that North Star is that the hardest thing is to live only once. So make it count and make it count for others as well.

It started with the town. I write by hand. So I wrote this the day after the election in 2020. When the results were coming in, it was kind of chaotic. No one knew what was the results were. And I said, all right, I'm going to rent a room. I live in Western Massachusetts. I'm going to rent a little cabin and just go away. And when I come back, hopefully we'll know what's happening.

But it got more and more convoluted, as you remember, from that election.

Showing 981–1000 of 1,158 · page 50 of 58