Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong joins us to discuss his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. Set in a fictional small town in Connecticut, it follows a 19-year-old grappling with addiction and despair, who forms an unexpected bond with an 82-year-old widow living with dementia. Together, they navigate memory and survival. He also talks about teaching and why he's put an end date on the number of books he'll write in his lifetime.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
What is the focus of Ocean Vuong's new novel?
And if you asked him, a refugee who escaped by boat, living, people, you know, relieving themselves on a tiny boat, throwing up overboard, seven days he spent at sea. And you asked him, did you manage to live your American life the way you wanted? Without batting an eye, he would say yes. Because he said... I have a uniform.
There's a stitching on the right chest with my name, my Vietnamese name, in diacritics. And our living room was so spare because we couldn't hang anything up. It was a HUD housing rental. So if you want to hang something up, you want to put a hole in something, you have to ask permission. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. You can't paint. You don't own anything.
So we lived in a kind of, it felt like a stage set. It wasn't ours. But he would come home and he put a thumbtack on the wall. He would hang that uniform every single day. And he said, I lived my life on my term. That was my American life that I wanted. He had health care. He had a salary. It's very relative for me because when I looked at his life, I saw something full of loss.
This man went to bed, woke up at 3pm to go to work, went to bed at 12am. I never saw him. He never saw his kids. My mother never saw him. And I looked at that, I said, gosh, my life needs to be different. Meanwhile, that was his triumph. And so to me, growing up, I realized that there are many versions of triumphs.
And I'm not interested in the American dream so much as I'm interested in Americans who dream. Because him and I had two different dreams. Both of them are valid dreams.
Well, one of the things that you do in this book through the story to the main character, hi, he works at a fast food restaurant. And so I'm thinking about your stepdad working in a factory. He had a family of circumstance as well at work in that same way. And those relationships, they're so fleeting, but they can be so deep as well. Yeah.
Because you depend on each other. And no ideology is strong enough to withstand kinetic kinship. That's what I learned working at Boston Market.
Because that's where you worked for how long? Three years. Three years, yeah. You also worked at other fast food restaurants. Panera Bread as well. Yeah, yeah.
Two very different places. But actually... Two very different places because they serve different communities. One was more upscale. Panera Bread was a little more upscale than Boston Market, but it was still minimum wage, $7.15. You still feel it. But you realize that People were kind of stuck. The shift was a trap.
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