BUY THE BOOK! The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-emperor-of-gladness/id6736382187 https://open.spotify.com/episode/50VqT29k6PQqGQzUnenogD In this episode of Oprah’s Book Club: Presented by Starbucks, Oprah sits down with acclaimed author Ocean Vuong to discuss his much-anticipated new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. Chosen as the 114th Oprah’s Book Club selection, The Emperor of Gladness reveals the many ways love, labor and loneliness show up in American life. The novel begins on a summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, where nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge ready to jump. An elderly widow suffering from dementia intervenes and the unlikely pair form a life-altering bond. In this episode, Ocean discusses this deeply personal narrative and his gift of illuminating the fullness of humanity in the most ordinary of places. Oprah and Ocean are joined by a live audience in a Starbucks Café in Chicago, enjoying the Iced Brown Sugar Oatmilk Shaken Espresso, layered with flavors of brown sugar, cinnamon and Starbucks® Blonde Espresso Roast. Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: Instagram Facebook TikTok Listen to the full podcast: Spotify Apple Podcasts #oprahsbookclub Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Ocean Vuong and what are his accomplishments?
I want to talk to you about being this accomplished author with so many awards, hard to mention them all. At just 36, you have a wild list of accomplishments. New York Times bestselling author. A professor of modern poetry at NYU, a multiple award-winning poet, essayist, novelist, screenwriter. You also won a MacArthur Genius Grant. And English isn't even your first language.
Where does this come from, this wellspring of creativity?
I have to say I was raised by women who were illiterate. And I think about this often. Where does it come from? I think even though they were illiterate, they were the first poets because they saw that when they came to this country with nothing, they realized that with language, they can make anything happen.
Chapter 2: How did Ocean Vuong's family background influence his creativity?
So I just want to say you and your family immigrated from Vietnam to the United States when you were just two years old. And I know your mother worked in a nail salon for 25 years to support the family. And she watched the Oprah show every day at four o'clock. That TV would be on. That's what you told me when I called you.
Sometimes it's just us three. Me, you and her. On slow days, I would answer the phone at the nail salon and, you know, she would be there working. And what's so interesting was that when you called me. This is Oprah. How are you? What? This is Oprah. How are you? I recognized the voice right away. I just didn't believe that you were talking to me for any real reason.
But when I heard your voice, I said, this is the voice I heard all my life at four o'clock when I answered the phone. And, you know, I wanted to tell you this, that your voice was a kind of Mediation for all of these women in the nail salon, both the workers and the people who went there to get their nails done.
Because I saw them when they came in with their husbands and the husband will wait for a while and then they will leave. And after a while, it will just be all women. And I found that their voices changed. with your voice among them. And as a child, it was so interesting to hear speech. Everyone talking differently. They were more vulnerable. They were more open with each other.
And I got to see my mother kind of use the show as a way to open up for herself and to learn the language. She would not always understand what was happening, but she would have this little trick where every time there was like an inflected moment in the show with your voice, my mother would...
work on a client she'd go oh boy and then the client would it always works you could any given time you could just say oh boy and then the client would say hey isn't that right and then she would learn what was happening from them because her voice her head is down she couldn't hear it
But I saw this kind of town square that your voice created and the themes and what was really touching for me, and I didn't understand at that time, for a community that I grew up in, working poor, immigrants, Reading was very intimidating. We didn't step into bookstores or libraries. It felt like an impenetrable world that was not for us.
And it was aligned with elitism and power and institutions and higher learning that we thought that ship has sailed for us. But when you held up the books in your show, my mother recognized that and says, This is accessible. You're making the act of reading both accessibly dignified, but also fruitful for people who are outside of these realms of institutional elitism.
And I saw the women talk about books in your show. And then they would walk across the Barnes & Noble, across the mall, and they would have language. And they would come in and they would say, this is the book I want. I know how to talk about it. And there's a kind of dignified confidence to literacy. Oh.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of labor and kindness in The Emperor of Gladness?
It feels like The Emperor was always inside you somewhere. How did it come to be?
Yeah. You know, America has often been founded on the idea of the nuclear family. And one antidote to that might be the found family. But I actually think when we look at the history of our culture, it's the circumstantial family. founded around labor.
And so when I worked at Boston Market as a teenager, I found that it was actually the relationships that you had with people you don't choose, people who are cobbled together, working through a shift, and you start to know their footsteps. you start to feel the cologne they wear, the gum, and when that gum will expire. You can hear how they cough, how they talk.
And the intimacy that comes from the circumstantial labor cobbled together is actually the foundation of so much of our country. So much of it is founded on labor, loneliness, and love in the midst of all that.
I think that's so powerful, don't you all? You have your chosen family, you have your family that you're born into. Many people have a chosen family that they found. But all of us who work
And certainly, I remember during certainly all the years that I spent here in Chicago, 25 years just down the street, that we were our own circumstantial family and were integrated in each other's lives in a way that you weren't integrated in the lives of all the people who were your biological family. And I have to say, you've created... the most memorable, misfit, motley crew of characters.
And I love that each one of them had their own level of kindness in their own unique way. And I think that that kind of group happens all over the world. People create camaraderie with each other. How did you come to realize each one of them and you were able to express each of their kindnesses
Well, I think when I was a fiction student, we were told, going back to Aristotle, that the greatest work of fiction usually has a reversal of fate. You have to change at the end to bring the audience a kind of catharsis. Rags to riches. He gets the girl. The girl gets the guy. You're going to find the body. You'll find the murderer.
So it works in a very commercial way that there's a promise of catharsis. There's a kind of deliverable.
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Chapter 4: How did Ocean Vuong's experiences working at Boston Market shape the novel?
But I wonder what would happen if we had prodigies of kindness, if we can celebrate children when we tap into this innate kindness. And I saw that at the home market, at the Boston markets, at the Panera Breads, where people are always... When there's so little they can do to affect change, they still go out of their way. They don't get paid extra. They don't get anything extra.
And yet it's the moments after the shifts, having the cigarettes, after being slammed, people being diagnosed with cancer in the middle of the shifts, getting on the phone calls.
I cherish the time I get to sit down with the talented authors from my book club, and I am equally grateful for the time you all are spending with me here, that you in particular have come to listen, dear listener. Coming up, I share a few of my favorite passages from Ocean Vuong's sweeping novel, The Emperor of Gladness. He is the most exquisite writer. Stay with us.
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I welcome you back, dear listener, to Oprah's Book Club. And I'm at a Starbucks in Chicago right now with an audience full of devoted readers. We are diving into what critics are calling epic, astonishing, and a masterwork. Ocean Bong's The Emperor of Gladness, my 114th Oprah's Book Club selection. Let's get back to the conversation. There was a wild moment.
In my time at Boston Market, that I'll still, I think I'll, it's been almost 20 years and it's still in my head. And it'll probably be in my head until I die. I didn't put it in the book because it's too dramatic. You know, sometimes as an author, you said life is more dramatic than fiction can allow, you know, be too, too pressurized. But I was being trained early on. by this man named Ruben.
He was in his 50s and he was training me. And the first thing he taught me was how to eat a spinach croissant in under 30 seconds. He says, if you're hungry, you don't have to take a break. You can slip two croissants in your apron and then you can go into the freezer because nobody goes into the freezer. You can't go into the bathroom because a customer might see you.
That's really odd to see someone eating a croissant. And then the next hour later, we're cleaning out the freezer. And there's something that's so peculiar with what I was talking about with circumstantial family. We have our backs to each other. I'm 19 years old. We're cleaning the freezer. And we're talking about family. We're talking, oh, you have a brother, what have you.
And to this day, I'm haunted by what happened because he's talking about his sons. And he just says something. He says, you know, I can't tell my wife this. And I thought, oh, my God. You know, like, am I going to hear a crime of God or a crime of the law? Yeah. He says, I have three sons, but I only love one of them. Wow. And I'm 19.
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Chapter 5: What does Ocean Vuong say about the writing process and listening?
I get one draft at Life, and I usually mess it up, but High got 12 drafts, so... He's a little more refined.
Okay, so I will tell you that I read chapter one sometimes just to soothe myself, particularly in these times. And over Christmas holidays, I was with my chosen family. I've raised these girls since they were 12 years old. And now they're in their 30s. And there were four of us at my house. And we were sitting around a crackling fire. Reading out loud. Chapter one.
I mean, when I think of that, I think about the people as teenagers drinking in their father's trucks. And I think, wow, all of that's true. And then time passes and then they're sitting there in the same trucks or different trucks. And there they are with the babies in their arms and they don't even know how they got there. How were you able to able to get that?
I think at the heart of every writer, you have to really love the world, even when it's difficult to love. And I think description... is autobiographical in that when you describe something, you're giving it a point of view. How you describe something, how you see something says a lot about yourself. And I think I saw all these people in my life and I never heard anyone write about them.
And I said, if the sentence can pin life to the page, I want to pin these people who never got to get out. You know, we fetishize these heroes' journey about getting out of this town, And it's a very cathartic one. We love these stories. We want to feel that everyone can get out. But the majority of people can't. And won't. And won't. And sometimes by choice.
Sometimes they have to stay and take care of elders who are ill. They have jobs they can't leave. And I just didn't see the literary world right about people who had to stay. Because that's actually much more interesting to me. It's easy to go to the big city... And have a different life. It's much harder but more interesting to ask yourself, how do I make do without escape?
That becomes an existential question. How do I make do in this body if I can't leave it? The book starts with a young man deciding to jump off a bridge. Yeah. And he's stopped by an elderly widow doing laundry. And it's a personal experience. Crux for me, because when I was a teenager, one of my best friends took his own life with a gun. He was 16. My uncle at 28 took his own life.
And usually when we talk about suicide, it's usually like, oh, they struggled, but then they didn't do it. And that's triumphant. Great. Well, actually, what I'm more interested in is like, how do you live And go on in the aftermath of that decision. If you decide to end your life and then ultimately decide not to, what's day two look like? What's day three look like?
What's the aftermath of living and deciding to live and have the will to live without the hope of living? And I wanted to know that of my uncle because I didn't get that from him. So I think I write in order to understand that, you know, what if he got to have an aftermath where he's still alive? What would that life look like?
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Chapter 6: Why did Ocean Vuong choose to write about ordinary people and their lives?
There's no improvement. It's just life and it's kindness without hope, which is kindness at the highest cost. And yet we all know people every day who are kind and gracious and good to each other despite all of that. Kindness without any hope of return. That's just something I'm so fascinated in.
Well, that's why I loved on page 253 where Grazina is talking and she says... To be alive and try to be a decent person and not turn it into anything big or grand, that's the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Didn't you notice that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office?
If you can be nobody and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that's enough. People don't know what's enough, LaBosse. That's their problem. They think they suffer, but they're actually just bored. They don't eat enough carrots. I love that. But I love that because she's so, that is so right.
I mean, to be able to stand on your own and to continue to be kind in a world that's often very unkind to you, that's the real hard work. Yeah. Thank you for choosing the Oprah podcast and for listening to my conversation with celebrated writer Ocean Vaughn. His extraordinary novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is my 114th Oprah's Book Club pick. And let me just say, I just think it's a must read.
It's one of those books that should be in your library. And I'm with an audience full of people who have read the book and have thoughtful questions for Ocean. Stay with us.
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Welcome back to Oprah's Book Club. I'm sitting down with award-winning author Ocean Vuong, author of my 114th book club selection, The Emperor of Gladness. It's a sweeping tale, so poetically and vividly written. On every page, it feels like you're in the story. You're in it with the characters. I know our audience felt the same way. So let's hear what questions our readers have for Ocean.
I love to hear what parts of the book they connected to. So let's get back to it. Our audience has read this book, and I know you're all excited to be able to ask questions. Prashita is here. Hi.
Hi.
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Chapter 7: What inspired the relationship between Hai and Grazina in the novel?
Yeah.
And no one knew where the country was going to be headed, who was going to head it. And I turned off all the radios and TV. I went to this cabin. I start writing by hand. And I spent nine pages writing about the towns in the Connecticut River Valley that sustained me, that I grew up in, because I wanted to really think, like, what is my America? What is America?
And I want to really sink in to the town as a character, as description. I wanted to really love it in all of its difficulty to just present it and not go on with a plot. So it started with space. It started with land and the history of land because land is tied to history. And at the end of the day, I think I write historical fiction, not in the sense of of, you know, a period piece.
But I write fiction that has history involved in it. And land is a part of history.
Yeah, on page three, where you're just scribing the natural area and you say, look how the birches blackened all night by starlings shatter when dawn's first sparks touch their beaks. I went, holy Jesus, who is this guy? When dawn's first shadow touches their beaks, it felt like we were right there watching them.
disperse right well the sentence is a linear technology so it's a kind of a track and what you do as an author is that you're asking a reader for their trust to say just stay with me in this track because it's a it's a big leap of faith it's almost like when you're riding on a roller coaster it's like we're it's one track
And as an author, you have to say, well, let's just come with me and we're going to zoom in on something that people often drive past and don't think about. And so the book is a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate value systems, to create a different hierarchy of values. Let's just stay on these starlings and love this landscape.
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Chapter 8: How do themes of loneliness and kindness without hope appear in the story?
Because it's so brutal, because it's so fruitful to the communities that live it. And also, what is America? You know, I was haunted by that. I don't know what next week is going to look like. But I know that this landscape in all of its paradoxes has sustained my imagination. And I want it to be true to its history.
Wow. Crystal is here. I hear the small town setting of this story. Really, you connected with this?
Very much so. Thank you so much, Ocean, for giving us this book. It was incredible. I loved it. Thank you. So I know that this is set in New England, but it felt like East Gladness could be any small town really suspended in time. I grew up in Middle America, in and around towns that were left behind.
And it immediately transported me in chapter one when I was really feeling something deeply familiar. So I felt really life at the edge of nothing, the looming presence of addiction, the randomness of tragedy, working poverty, fast food. And this isn't the first time that you've written about small towns and near rural life.
And I wanted to know what draws you to this kind of setting and what continues to inspire you about places like this.
I grew up in Hartford and Hartford is interesting because if you drive, you're in the middle of the city and it's the city that's often been forgotten. We often have a saying that all the good things are sucked up by Boston and New York. And so it is a place where when you come to it, the people there are the people who can't get out, right? They're what's left over. We have that mentality.
And Hartford's interesting. You drive 20 minutes and you'll be in a cornfield. You could be in the middle of skyscrapers, drive 20 minutes in any direction, you'll be in a smack dab in a cornfield.
I was surprised to hear that because I used to go to Hartford. My friend Gail started her career there in Hartford.
Wow, really?
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