'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
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What is Ocean Vuong's background story?
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. In a lot of ways, Ocean Vuong's life makes for a classic American success story. He and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam in 1990, when he was just a small child. They landed in Hartford, Connecticut, and pretty quickly fell into a hardscrabble existence ruled by low-paying work and low expectations.
How did literature change Ocean Vuong's life?
Until, that is, Ocean discovered literature and his own gift for writing. Vuong is now one of the country's most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a Genius Grant, and he's a professor in the creative writing department at New York University. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, came out in 2019 and became a bestseller and a bonafide millennial classic. All this, and he's still only 36 years old. But there's another side to Vuong's story, and that's about the flip side of success and the lingering pain of his mixed-up youth. It's that part of his story, the one that doesn't resolve so neatly, that lies at the heart of his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. It's a bigger book in every respect than his first, in a way that makes Vuong kind of nervous about how it'll be received.
What is the significance of 'The Emperor of Gladness'?
I'll say, too, that the book was a launching pad for what turned out to be one of the most emotionally intense interviews I think I've ever done. Here's my conversation with Ocean Vuong. So thank you for taking the time to do this. I appreciate it. Thank you, David. Pleasure.
What experiences inspired Ocean Vuong's writing?
So Emperor of Gladness, your new novel, is based at least in part on your experiences working at fast food restaurants in small town Connecticut. So where did you work and what were the jobs there?
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.
Yeah. What did you learn about people from working at Boston Market and Panera Bread?
What lessons did Ocean Vuong learn from working in fast food?
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?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Ocean Vuong's background story?
0:04–0:29
2
How did literature change Ocean Vuong's life?
0:29–1:19
3
What is the significance of 'The Emperor of Gladness'?
1:19–1:40
4
What experiences inspired Ocean Vuong's writing?
1:40–2:56
5
How does Ocean Vuong describe his fast food job experiences?
2:56
6
What lessons did Ocean Vuong learn from working in fast food?
2:56–9:32
7
What was the pivotal moment in Ocean Vuong's youth?
9:32–22:15
8
How did Buddhism influence Ocean Vuong's understanding of life?
22:15–49:32
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Daily
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