The Emperor of Gladness<\/p>\n
It is fair to say that Vuong has found success writing about himself. And there is good, if gruelling, material: his grandfather, a farmhand from Michigan, met his Vietnamese grandmother while he was serving during the Vietnam War. They had three daughters, one of whom was Vuong\u2019s mother. She raised her son in Ho Chi Minh City, until a police officer discovered she was mixed race (under Vietnamese law at the time, she was not allowed to work) and the family was forced to flee. They headed to the Philippines, before settling in Hartford, the capital city of Connecticut. Vuong was two. In America, his father abandoned the family, while his mother worked at a nail salon. He learnt to read at 11, eventually studied for his BA in English at Brooklyn College, and later received his MFA in poetry from New York University. <\/p>\n Themes of parentage, patriotism, queerness (he has a long-term partner, Peter) thread through Vuong\u2019s work: in 2017\u2019s Forward prize-winning debut collection of poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds; in 2019\u2019s epistolary novel, On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous, which tells the story of a refugee who falls in love with a tobacco field worker (Vuong used to work at such a farm earning $9.50 an hour, cash); and in 2022\u2019s Time is a Mother, a series of poems written after his mother\u2019s death. \u201cI\u2019m deeply invested in autofiction because the stakes are so high, right?\u201d Vuong tells me at one point. \u201cIt\u2019s both the world that I live through and it\u2019s the world that I\u2019m trying to launch as a kind of simulation.\u201d <\/p>\n The small-town world of The Emperor of Gladness will be familiar to Vuong\u2019s readers. Hai has a tempestuous relationship with his mother \u2013 a well-worn topic in the author\u2019s work \u2013 and lies to her about attending medical school (their phone conversations, which Hai fills with fantasies about campus life, are some of the most moving passages here). He is also holding onto the memory (and jacket) of a boy he met working tobacco. But as our protagonist, over the course of a year, learns to work with his fellow fast-food labourers and becomes a best friend and carer to Grazina, there is something new and, at times discomforting, in Vuong\u2019s writing: a refusal to play by typical storytelling rules.<\/p>\n You might expect a tearful reunion between Hai and his mother. Or the hours in a sweaty kitchen to lead to a promotion or an easier life. No such luck. \u201cI just did not want to have an arc of improvement,\u201d Vuong tells me, pointing to the novel\u2019s 2009 setting, which he calls \u201cthe height of supposed Obama hope.\u201d \u201cI saw Obama rise to his presidency and immediately bail out corporations that were too big to fail,\u201d he says. \u201cI think my generation, coming up at the time, was completely disenfranchised.\u201d That political settling ties into Vuong\u2019s impulse towards Eastern philosophy \u2013 particularly the Japanese literary movement ma, which he describes as a \u201clull in the story\u201d \u2013 and results in a narrative that can frustrate and delight. As Vuong playfully puts it: \u201cIt\u2019s like The Lord of the Rings, but there\u2019s no ring, right?\u201d<\/p>\n Jonathan Cape On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: Ocean Vuong<\/p>\n That is not to say the novel, nor Vuong, is totally nihilistic: characters change, relationships evolve, and there is comfort to be found amid the mundane. In a poignant episode that comes to define the novel\u2019s ethos, Vuong describes a cigarette break between Hai and his colleague, known only as \u201cthe Russian\u201d: \u201cThere was a kind of luxury to be amongst this place of sweat and ache and yet sit and suck a cigarette down to its soggy nub and have no one tell you anything because you\u2019re off the clock.\u201d <\/p>\n It is the kind of observation you\u2019d only be able to make with first-hand experience, and sure enough, Vuong has worked in the fast-food industry. It\u2019s a setting, he believes, for \u201ccircumstantial family\u201d: where Vuong, a queer person, was able to work alongside his boss, an evangelical Christian escaping religious persecution in Pakistan, and just aim to \u201cclose the shift without catastrophe\u201d. \u201cIdeologies didn\u2019t hold up,\u201d he notes, \u201cwhen you had to depend on each other during the lunchtime rush.\u201d<\/p>\n Vuong is currently at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, hiding away in the woods on spring break. He teaches an MFA in creative writing at New York University, and next week he will be back in the city to wrap up the term with his students. I imagine he is a popular teacher: our conversation is fast-paced and eclectic \u2014 ranging from French writer Marguerite Duras to Netflix<\/a> megahit Adolescence<\/a> \u2014 and then, all of a sudden, inspiring. He engages in what he calls a \u201csomatic practice\u201d when he writes, jotting down ideas when inspiration hits (usually, and many of us will relate, in the shower). \u201cWhen the notebooks are full, it\u2019s almost like a dam that\u2019s about to be breached,\u201d he says, in a typically lucid flourish. \u201cAnd you feel the crack, there\u2019s enough water, and it\u2019s time to open the dam.\u201d \u25cb<\/p>\n \u2018The Emperor of Gladness\u2019 by Ocean Vuong is out now (Jonathan Cape)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few weeks before the publication of Ocean Vuong\u2019s first novel, 2019\u2019s On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous, his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,46719,48686,14732,77,3989,1330,48685,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-106200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-content-type-interview","10":"tag-contentid-3500404d-b2af-48eb-809d-3b54e433374c","11":"tag-displaytype-long-form-article","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-hasproduct-true","14":"tag-locale-gb","15":"tag-shorttitle-ocean-vuong-on-the-emperor-of-gladness","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114517400985103585","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/1747394511-71EN1HSxLaL.jpg\" "\\"The")
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