Ocean Vuong

It's like, oh, I work so hard, but I'm not feeding my family.

I work so hard, but I'm still stuck in this tenement.

And you know, my mother told me,

I remember we were just talking one day before bed.

And I just like to just talk to her before bed.

I was like 10 or 11.

And she turned to me and she said, I'm so sorry that our family is so stupid.

We couldn't make it.

It's been 10 years in this country, and other folks have started businesses that are lucrative.

They've gone off to Houston and LA, other Vietnamese communities.

They bought homes, and we can't figure it out.

I'm sorry that we're just so dumb.

That gets to the heart of what it means to be poor, is that you start to feel that you're not a good person.

Because

Other people could afford to give, right?

The heroes in our public discourse are the ones, the entrepreneurs, the ones that can donate and give and rescue children and rescue the people.

But when you don't, when you, every day you don't have enough.

to even be the hero of your family, that you start to feel like you're the villain of your community.

And so when I was a kid, in that moment, by my mother's bed, and in that moment by the grocery store, seeing, to the day I die, I'll see those plum tomatoes roll back on this dirty conveyor belt.

you realize, I told myself, I'm going to use the shame and it's going to propel me to understand it.