With new novel, Ocean Vuong says he wants to reframe America as a place of salvage
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's something patriotic about today's interview. It's with the writer Ocean Vuong, who's got a new novel titled The Emperor of Gladness. It's about a 19-year-old boy who befriends an elderly woman with dementia, something that happened to Vuong himself.

And it's not as if this book is raw, raw American jingoism. It's not that kind of patriotism. But instead, in this interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro, Vuong hits on the almost ineffable essence that binds us all as Americans. That's ahead.

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Today, the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong sits among an elite sliver of celebrated U.S. writers. His debut novel on Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous won a bunch of awards in 2019. He got a MacArthur Fellowship, known as a Genius Grant. He's on faculty at NYU. All of that is very different from the environment where he grew up, raised by working-class Vietnamese immigrants in Hartford, Connecticut.

a place a lot like the post-industrial town of East Gladness, where his latest novel is set. Here's how Ocean Vuong describes it early in his new book, The Emperor of Gladness. It's a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfather's trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot.

"'drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles "'and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne "'until they look down one night "'to find a baby in their arms "'and realize they're thirty-something "'and the Walmart hasn't changed "'except for its logo, brighter now. "'Literal.

lending a bluish glow to their time-gone faces. The novel centers on an unlikely friendship. Between a 19-year-old college dropout named Hai and an 82-year-old with dementia named Grajina, Ocean Vuong told me the two have something important in common. Well, I think in many ways we throw around the phrase quintessential America, and we can say...

It's the white picket fence. It's the American dream. But what I actually thought looking at these two people was that they both come from war. Grigino flees Stalin in World War II. Hai and his family fled the war in Vietnam.

And there's nothing more quintessentially American than to have two strangers who survived two wars 30 years apart meet and actually share this sort of shared bond of survival. And to me, I want to reframe America as not just this place of opportunity, but a place where things can be salvaged.

through debris. Both Hai and Grazina are debris ejected from two horrifying geopolitical ruptures, but they are not trash. They are not garbage. They are debris that has picked themselves up and created a new life. The last page of this book says, in memory of Grazina J. Vercelis, 1925 to 2014, that

And reading that suddenly threw the rest of the novel into a different kind of context for me. I was dying to know, who is she? Who is this other Georgina? She was an incredible woman who I managed to live with as I was going through college. I dropped out of Pace University and I lost my housing. And when I signed up to study at Brooklyn College, I got in, but I didn't have housing. Eventually, a friend of mine basically said, my grandmother died.

is living alone. And if you go and live with her and just take care of her, you have a room. And I didn't know what I was getting into. I was, you know, 19. I thought taking care of just meant being there. But boy, you know, right away I learned words like dementia, words like Aricept, you know. That's a word I don't know. It's a medication for dementia. And I realize in this country, both the young and the very old have been pushed into

on the margins. The young have been deemed inadequate. They don't have the means or the assets to contribute properly to American progress. And the old have been deemed defunct. They are outside of their working productive years. And the common ground between the 40, 50 years between us was that we were both completely isolated and the immense loneliness of

of the very young and the very old was actually a binding, beautiful moment for us. And I would sit there watching The Price is Right with her as if I was sitting with my grandmother. And it really changed what I thought human interactions and human potential could be because it really wasn't about our racial differences or our cultural ones. It was about necessity.

I found out that living with her, I was more useful to her than I was ever to myself. And it changed how I considered my role as an artist, as a person. And it was really important. Do you want to take a moment? Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, of course. Take your time. Do you want a drink of water? Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, sure. Yeah.

The first time these two characters meet, Hai tells Grajina, my dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable things. Is that also your dream? Is that what this novel is? Yes, absolutely. Growing up in Hartford, my family and I came from Vietnam. We didn't have a lot of English knowledge.

And we were living in one bedroom apartment on government assistance, sponsored by the Salvation Army, bless their hearts. And we were invited into the Baptist church. And that's where I first encountered the myth of Noah's Ark. And I thought it was real as a seven, eight-year-old. I said, my goodness, what a life to build something and put everything into it that would survive an apocalypse. What would I put into it?

And to me, it's the beautiful things and the ugly things that will then teach us how to be and how to learn from each other. In this book, there are so many moments where ugly things are happening and they're described in a beautiful way, whether it is a pig slaughterhouse or a character who's in recovery relapses and you write, he was warm as a blood cell being swept through the vein of a fallen angel, finally good. Is there a kind of...

power or even radicalism in bringing beauty to ugliness, to the unlovable things, to scenes even of horror? I think so. And in this sense, I have to credit the women who raised me. I was raised by my grandmother and my mother and my aunts, all of whom were illiterate, but they were not without the capacity for wonder. And I think when you have so little to give your children as they did,

As refugees, they gave me the capacity to understand wonder. There is an epistemology to understanding and learning how to be befuddled and at awe of the world at once. And so to me, that became really technique and craft. The challenge is, can you look at the world long enough

to worship the potential of it. And I think language is really interesting because how you describe something reveals who you are. Description is DNA. And so the more we describe the world, the more we actually share our values, our perspectives. And I think there is a kind of Buddhist ethos to what I believe in in my description is that nothing is irredeemable.

Even the ugly, the worst of us have potential to be salvaged. And to me, the sentence perhaps is the most capacious medium for that effort.

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We're going to keep going with this interview between Ocean Vuong and Ari Shapiro because that essence I mentioned at the top, it extends out beyond the two main characters in this book. Here's Ari again. In his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong describes characters who work together in a Connecticut fast food restaurant as people bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen.

paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect.

so that they would come to know the sound of each other's coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones. Vuong worked in fast food, and The Emperor of Gladness is partly a love letter to these workers. I think they are Americans who dream. You know, I think I'm more interested in Americans who dream than I am in the American dream. Because when you reframe that, you reframe the American dream,

as something around Americans who dream, you get to see them as individuals and you realize there is no monolith to this place that we live in. It's so large. Most of us don't even really know how other parts of us live. But when you look at people who work in a fast food restaurant, you realize that no matter how different their ideologies are, and there were vastly different ideologies where I worked first,

Kinetic kinship degrades and corrodes those ideologies. It's really hard to hate somebody when you need them to finish the shift with you. When you start to see them sweat in the third or fourth hour, and you see the sweat glistening on the locket that they have around their neck, how it opens to the picture of their grandmother who they love dearly.

It made a big impact on me as a person to know that human relationships will always outpace ideological polemics. You know, my grandfather made my mother work in a factory for a summer because he wanted her to have that experience, which to me always seemed a little cruel. And you're making me see it in a different light, that there may have been a gift he gave her beyond the knowledge of hard, repetitive work that goes to what you're describing right now.

Yes, I think, you know, I can't speak for your grandfather, but I think you realize that everything you do has a price. It has a cost. Every action you take, you know, fast food workers, their humanity is often obfuscated. They are valued only for their hands, what they can do with their hands. But they are some of the most valuable.

I've seen some of the greatest problem solving and innovation in a fast food restaurant. I've seen a chicken thigh taped to a freezer to keep it open. I'll never forget it. And it's like, that's a perfect way to solve that because there was nothing else that would keep it open just enough so we can go in and out.

And to me, these are survival artists. You're reminding me to mention that this book also has a tremendous sense of humor. There are moments that made me laugh out loud in the midst of the beauty and the pain and the epic sweep of these individual lives. There are just absurd, hilarious sequences. I think you realize that you have to laugh in order to not cry.

And I think when you know that you're going into this little box of a restaurant and you're going to be with six or seven people for the next eight hours, it's almost like a sonnet. You know, the sonnet has been accredited to being one of the most innovative forms of anglophonic poetry because of its restrictions.

It demands, you can't veer too far. So you have to innovate inward. And that's what the shift was to me, is that I knew that I could not turn away from these people, regardless of how I feel about them. So I needed to build a relationship that would help us survive. And part of that is humor. You know, the immense amount of humor and the absurdity of living the modern life.

And showcasing that freely was how we got through some of those brutal, brutal shifts. Ocean Vuong's new novel is The Emperor of Gladness. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Ari. It's an honor.

And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Martha Ann Overland, Michael Radcliffe.

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