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

I wanted to do the hero's journey without the payoff. So then it's just the love. That pushed them forward, not the diamond. You don't get the ring. There's there's no like final gift. This is what's so beautiful about the book, don't you think?

I worked on a tobacco farm illegally as a child. I got paid under the table. I was 15. It was for 9.50, which was back in 2002, was a whole load of money. The minimum wage was 7.15. So you get 9.50 picking tobacco. It meant the world. But some of the workers there They were all older. They also, they said, hey, there's a, you want to come to this, you know, slaughterhouse, you make $20 an hour.

$9.50.

Okay. So it was $20 at this slaughterhouse in Connecticut. And I thought, you know, I didn't really, I thought in my head, in my 15-year-old head, it was like just packaging meat, you know? Like I thought, oh, yeah, just put it in a little tray and then it goes off to the supermarket. Yeah. And I followed these guys in the pickup truck one day. They drove us there. And it was my trial.

I lasted just 30 minutes. I went in, I looked, I said, it was like war. And I was so interested in that because I think often we say, There's humanity, and then there's animalistic tendencies. But when I look at our history as a species, it's the humans that are the most animalistic. And the way that these hogs were butchered was so cruel, so bloody.

And I wanted to parallel that as an allegory with how labor is in this country. You know, people work day in and night out, and they're just thrown to the wolves. And when their bodies break, as many of my relatives' bodies stop working, my mother's breast cancer, which ultimately killed her, was most likely breathing all the chemicals in factories and nail salons. You're just thrown out.

And the slaughter of human beings, both in the opioid epidemic and the labor system, is very parallel to the slaughter of animals. And I've learned that if we want to really know how brutal we can be as a species, we have to look at what we've done to animals. And that becomes the foreshadow of what we will do to each other.

I'm going to sit with that a second.

Oh, very good. Very good reader. The professor in me gives you an A+. So there are many allusions to this. And it starts with the Hamlet quote, right? We fat all creatures else to fat us. We fat ourselves for maggots. And so it's a lovely quote because in that is this anxiety of the Anthropocene. All our dreams and wishes for what? to give a nice buffet to the maggots, right?

And it's a wonderful way. It sounds morbid, but it's actually a wonderful way to live life, to say that all the petty arguments, for what? We're going to all end up in the same place. If we're lucky, we'll get a deathbed, right? We get to meet the people that raised us and supported us before we become food for maggots. And so the emperor, the ultimate emperor for Shakespeare was the maggot.

The smallest thing is the ruler of us all. But I like the title as a poet because there's always double meanings, right? So it feels very triumphant when you see it like in a bookstore. The Emperor of Gladness. I'm going to read it and feel all the good things. Yes. But as you see it in the first chapter, Gladness as a town doesn't exist. It's been renamed to Millsap.

And so to be the emperor of gladness is to be the emperor of nothing, of emptiness. And when the emperor hogs, naming is also a kind of warping of meaning. They're called emperor hogs not because they rule over anything, but because they historically have been used to feed the emperor. And it's such a cruel part of naming.

And so I hope that when readers get to that revelation, the title starts to change tone. And as a poet, I just love it when the same words change. start to get warped. I think ultimately that's what I'm interested in is warping what was once stable towards something much more malleable. It's not about making something concrete, but dissolving it towards the end of the book. That's my hope.

And emperor is a wonderful word that has multiple meanings in that sense.

Well, I think it's important to destigmatize sadness and depression. I think if anyone's paying attention in the 21st century, they should be sad. But it doesn't mean that they're condemned to sadness. And this is what your show did. When I was in the nail salon as an eight-year-old, what you see is a bunch of strangers come together. And you talked about sadness.

You talked about families falling apart. You talked about people surviving sexual assault on your show. And all of a sudden, these women, all of whom are strangers, now have permission to share their stories. And suddenly I saw... Language, you know, because that's what your show was. It's talking.

Language suddenly became this permission for everyone to bypass the small talk, bypass talking about the weather or where I'm from, the patriots.

And talk about our moments that keep us up at night and destigmatize vulnerability. And everyone in the nail salon just lit up and they were all in the same shared moment. And there was an incredible moment. Another moment for me, there's these two moments that stuck with me in the nail salon. where my mother was not working on this woman, but she was next to the same desk.

And your show was talking about estranged families, parents not being able to talk, something like that. And we were all kind of wrapped and chit-chatting. And this woman getting her nail done, she stopped and she just says, well, some days I wish I didn't have any parents. And everyone was just kind of like, what do we do? There was a moment, to me as a child, it felt endless.

Because I knew enough to think that's a crazy thing to say. Because that means you wouldn't be alive. Yeah. And all of a sudden, another woman down the aisle just started comforting her. And before you know it, everyone... I said, you know what, I feel the same way too, but there's other ways. You don't have to feel that way.

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