Ocean Vuong, writer: ‘I am a product of the welfare state, which is being abused right now in America’

He had already published various books of poetry and received prestigious prizes like the T.S. Eliot in 2019, when Ocean Vuong, 36, truly made an impact with his delicate-yet-raw, subtle, moving and uncensored first prose work On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press). Winner of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant that same year, the Vietnamese writer, who arrived in the United States via a refugee camp, whose mother was illiterate and worked in a nail salon, and who today teaches classes at New York University, returns to the new releases table with The Emperor of Gladness.

In its pages, Vuong rediscovers the tenderness, humanity, humor and unpredictable moments of happiness in lives that unfold on the margins of society, or in the kitchens of a fast-food restaurant. He speaks of the existential void that permeates the landscape, about unusual friendships that pull the protagonist out of the quagmire, about dementia, desire, drug addiction, dreams and harsh realities where, nevertheless, there is room for human connection. The plot takes place in Joy, a fictional town in Massachusetts, and it is from that state — where Vuong grew up and now lives with with his partner — that the author connects to our interview via video call. Vuong avoids turning on the camera, but he is a great conversationalist who does not hesitate to warn about technological alienation and the unnavigable darkness in which we find ourselves today.

Question. Tell me about this book. Where did it start?

Answer. I wanted to write a book about the failure of the American dream. I’ve rarely seen novels that are written about that, and if they are, they’re very traumatic, full of poverty porn, without the dignity that I saw in working-class people. I wanted to write a novel where there were no victims and there were no villains. People live. People don’t have to break out in order for the novel to have power or value.

Q. How does The Emperor of Gladness fit into your trajectory?

A. My first novel was a letter from a son to a mother. The main character, Little Dog, is writing about becoming a writer. [I asked myself] what would his first novel look like? Some of my heroes look at history inexhaustibly — you think of [James] Baldwin, Marguerite Duras, they kept writing the same story over and over. I wanted to stubbornly return to the same ground, but with different materials, different contexts, and to rewrite the same ideas, but with a different tone. I was inspired by the work of Hayao Miyazaki. He created a charming, soft aesthetic in order to write about the most horrific things in human species: war, ecological disaster, hunger, violence, existential crisis, consumption.

Q. To vindicate the importance of poetry in prose?

A. The novel can hold the poem, but the poem cannot hold the novel. I’m interested in what Aristotle calls the difference between memesis and poesis. In the American tradition, we have been really stuck in realism. Henry James really got us in trouble where he says the greatest work of fiction is to be indissoluble to life. I’ve always been suspicious of that. Description is autobiographical, it is history. You get speed, you get violent. And then before you know what the book is about, you realize, this is a point of view that has seen violence. I was interested in turning every sentence into a place of transformation and alterity, a place to see the world differently.

Q. Are you worried at all about criticism?

A. No, I was a Buddhist before I became an author.

Q. How do you think being a Buddhist has influenced you as a writer?

A. I’ve been a Buddhist since I was 15 and I did not become a serious writer until I was 19. The first thing we learn in Buddhism is that the self is not real, it is a kind of hallucination. I’m not interested in legacy, I’m not interested in the idea of fame. Any time I get a prize or a fellowship, I sit down to meditate and I send that blessing back out to my family who helped me, my elders, my ancestors, my teachers. There’s only one name on the front cover, but an entire army of people made that author possible. It could be really disorienting and deceptive to really believe in your achievements.

Q. The community that sustains the individual is one of the subjects of the book.

A. Melville and Moby Dick inspire me. It’s about a multiracial group of laborers working to light the free world and the result is a self-destructive quest of hunger, profit, greed, existential meaning. I feel like we’re still in that kind of debris right now. Having a setting of the fast-food restaurant, I wanted the setting to be a character. The daily grind of these people suddenly becomes a communal act.

Q. The novel parodies retreats and creative writing programs.

A. The school that I was talking about was Bennington College, this kind of fantasy life. When you visit it — I have friends who’ve gone through it, and you realize that what no one talks about is that almost everyone there is rich. I became a writer because of failure. I tried to go to business school. I wasn’t cut out for it. I dropped out. I was so ashamed to return to my mother empty-handed that I stayed in New York. I just went to open mics, I went to bars reading my poems. And then someone said, why don’t you get a degree in English, since you like literature? For me, shame was a propulsive force.

I was a Buddhist before I became an author

Q. How does it feel to look back?

A. I look at it as as a miracle. It’s a series of accidents, luck, hard work, but also mercy. I am a product of the welfare state, which is being abused right now in America. I am a product of of social housing, public transportation, government scholarship, heat assistance, food stamps, of the nearby church where we got free bread and groceries in exchange for listening to a sermon. I am in a way antithetical to conservative American values. I don’t know if I would be here if I did not grow up in a blue state, where high taxation created a social network that I benefited from.

Q. You set The Emperor of Gladness during the Obama administration. Why?

A. 2008 to 2009 was the beginning of my political consciousness. I believed in everything Obama said, and within a few months [of getting to the White House], you heard him say things like, we need to bail out the big corporations. But no one bailed out my friends, no one bailed out my community. And then war kept going. I started to realize that they’re both America, both Barack Obama and Donald Trump are too far to the right. We don’t know what leftist politics really looks like in America.

Q. How do you understand the rise of Trump?

A. If you are a working poor person and you voted for Obama and you realized that his administration was going to bail out the super-rich, you realized that politics are not for you. So Trump came in and swept up all those people that were disengaged and turned them, through propaganda, onto his side. “I will make America great again.” I think Trump is a poet because the power of that phrase is linguistically seductive, vague enough to encompass every subjectivity. What he’s really saying is “I will restore your childhood,” a time before they lost their grandparents, before they got fired, before their heart was broken, before they realized that they were poor, before they had shame about who they were, before they were humiliated in the workplace. If a billionaire comes to your forgotten town and says, I will restore your childhood, it’s so seductive.

Q. In a time of so much polarization, your book talks about the bridges of humanity that are built between people.

A. It’s my way of understanding life. To me, labor is also community, if you are working with someone side by side, it’s very hard to hate them, even if you have ideological differences. When I worked on tobacco farms, nail salons, there were people who believed they were televangelists, evangelist Christians who thought I should be burning in hell. But after months of working together, all of a sudden, all those things start to fade. There was a human being coming through. With the digital age, we have now made cruelty normal. You can work and socialize all without leaving your room. We are now in a different kind of alienation. We went from becoming a labor force to a commodity. I don’t see us revolting from the couch and saying this has to be enough, in the same way workers went on strike in the 19th century.

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