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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · 13 May 2025
podcast
And then the person working on her nail, my mom's friend, said, well, I'm glad you're here because I wouldn't get to make your hand so beautiful. And all of a sudden, here we are in an afternoon in Connecticut surrounding a woman who maybe wished she wasn't born and trying to convince her that she should have been here. And then that revealed this kind of doubt in ourselves.
And then she, you know, it's interesting, she just started laughing. And we laugh because it's a relief of tension. And we all kind of start, that session just ended with everyone laughing. I don't know why these things happen, but language creates more language. And when we pay attention to it, the way you've done your whole career, you open up these little chasms. That woman said what she said.
We met her where she was. And it was because this.
There's just the yesterday when she was here. And then there's the today when she's not. I know there's been many years since that. I can't, I can't, it's only one threshold. Mom and no mom. I was raised by a single mother. And, you know, when I was at her deathbed, I couldn't say what I wanted to say.
As much as I just talked about how language makes more language, sometimes when you're kneeling at your mom's deathbed and she's hallucinating, you can't say the conversations. You have to meet them where they are. And I didn't get to say what I wanted to say to her which is why I wrote that in the last page of this book. The last page of this book is what I wanted to say to my mother.
And I think that's the most powerful thing about fiction is that you give yourself a second chance. You create a scenario where these characters can play it out for you. And Hai and his mother has this conversation that I wish I had with my mom. But I had no right to bring that on to her when she's taking her last breaths. And so...
You write fiction to create something that's shareable for people. And in a way, it's a fantasy. It's what I hoped I could say, but I didn't get to say it to the real person. And so I create a dreamland where everyone gets to say what they need to say.
I worked at a place called Boston Market in a place called Panera. And I was living in HUD housing. It's a one-bedroom apartment with my mother and my brother. It was this kind of situation where if your family income surpassed, then you can't live there anymore. But the next housing opportunity would be unaffordable to us. So my mother literally...
said, you know, when you get a job, just work at McDonald's to stay under. It was, you know, McDonald's $7.15 an hour, which is minimum wage. And in the summers, I worked on a tobacco farm, which is $9.50 cash. No Uncle Sam involved.
So you confront as a teenager immediately this kind of like antithesis of like American prosperity and upward mobility, where it's like, don't make too much money or we'll be homeless. Yeah. But a lot of people had that predicament. So I went to Boston Market, which is now like a very eye-opening experience of American life, I think.
Well, first of all, I learned that everything is about deception, right? We didn't cook anything. The entire thing was a series of microwaves in various, you know, it's taking frozen sacks of food in giant plastic bags, reheating it, and then presenting wholesome home-cooked meals. But what I learned was, you know, we have this idea of American life being the nuclear family.
But I think a huge portion of how this country is formed is through circumstantial family. labor, this arbitrary cobbling of strangers thrown together. And then we have to kind of sacrifice relationships with our own family in order to be here. And yet, intimacies arise despite that, because human beings, no matter where they are, will find bounding relationships.
And a month in, you'll start to know whose cough belongs to who. You'll know when, you know, Joe's drugstore deodorant will wear off at which hour, right? I'm like, we're at the third hour. I'm going to start to smell his BO underneath the deodorant. And there's nothing more intimate than that. But you also, you're so dependent on each other.
I'm not a soldier, so I would never compare it to war, but it's just kind of like going through a battle sometimes, especially when you're about to close and a purple bus pulls up and it's a bunch of Catholic school kids after their prom and you're slammed. And you have to depend on each other. And there's a kindness that arises out of that. There's also a deep frustration. What frustration?
Frustration. That underneath it all, every employee kind of knows that this is not it. This is not the way out. And it's kind of the elephant in the room. And the manager is paid just a little more than us. I think at that time, they were paid maybe $13 to $15. We were paid $7 to $15. So, you know, almost double. But the suffering that they went through... showed us it wasn't enough.
Like my first, I watched someone get promoted and then turn it down, right? It was like, we had this ceremony. We're promoting somebody and it was a grand thing where the manager came out. We closed the store and said, all right, you know, we're going to promote Jennifer today and welcome Jennifer. And she's just like,
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's interesting because... the fast food restaurant in a way obfuscates the worker's humanity because everyone's in a uniform. You're just hands. Your most valuable asset are your hands, not your personhood. And I think there's, what I'm interested in this novel and in my life in general is when humanity breaches these moments.
To this day, I think it's almost 20 years ago now, But till the end of my life, I will remember this one moment. I was being trained by this man named Ruben. One day we were cleaning the freezer. And I don't know what to do with this fact, but it's just, I didn't put it in the book because it's too dramatic.
You know, sometimes life is like both cornier and more dramatic than any fiction you can do. But it's been haunting me for forever. I'm 19. And we have our backs together. It's like maybe like six foot wide. And it's almost touching. And we're just cleaning. And we're talking about family. And he stops and he says this thing. He has his back to me.
Showing 1041–1060 of 1,158 · page 53 of 58
← Previous
Next →