Ocean Vuong: ‘Our relationships are more lasting than our ideologies’

Ocean Vuong describes himself as a “very slow thinker”. When the 36-year-old author speaks, he does so slowly and softly, handling each word like a baby animal. When he writes books, he is equally careful. It has been six years since Vuong’s bestselling debut novel, On Earth We‘re Briefly Gorgeous, and despite the rapturous acclaim it received at the time – author Max Porter notably called it the new “great American novel” – he has been fairly quiet. That’s not to say there haven’t been other major moments: he won the MacArthur Fellowship (AKA the “genius grant”) in 2019, published a poetry collection on his mother’s death, made friends with Björk, and became a tenured professor at NYU’s creative writing department (he teaches modern poetry and poetics). But Vuong’s fictive follow-up to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous has been long anticipated – and, this week, it finally comes to the UK.

The Emperor of Gladness starts on a late summer evening in 2009, where 19-year-old Hai – a heartbroken recovering addict – is about to throw himself off a bridge. He is living in the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut; a suffocating place where “ghosts never leave” and “everyone rushes past, either on the way in or to get the hell out”. Hai is hoping to drown himself, but is stopped when he hears the shouts of Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian refugee with dementia. The pair go on to form an unlikely bond, offering each other warmth in a country that seems intent on freezing them out. Hai pieces himself back together, becoming Grazina’s live-in carer and taking a job at a fast food chain with a motley crew of other lost souls (“he was America’s fuel… burning to be used, to be useful”).

Like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, The Emperor of Gladness is partly based on Vuong’s own life: there was a real Grazina, he did work in fast food restaurants, and he did grapple with his own rock bottom (he admitted to the New York Times that, while he didn’t consider suicide, he did at one point consider murder). Like his debut, there is no American dream to be found in these pages: this is a country of fluffernutter sandwiches and neon Gatorade, of chicken grease and opioids (overdoses are common, and Hai regularly raids Grazina’s cupboard for drugs to “sepia things out for a bit”). Life is defined by its stagnancy, and work by its dead-end nature. Where do you find hope when you know there is no escape? Is connection, even in the most unexpected places, our only real source of salvation?

The Emperor of Gladness may have taken Vuong six years to write, but it is his most vivid, ambitious work yet. When we speak over the phone, a few weeks before the novel’s release, he admits that it took him “a lot of time” to find its form. “This book is set in 2009, so 15 years ago,” he reflects. “Maybe in another 15 years, I will write about trying to be an artist while our civil liberties are being eroded and our country is run by oligarchs who are bordering on fascism. If we make it to 15 years later, hopefully I can write a book about that.”

This novel is partly based on your own experiences. Did you always know that you wanted to write about this time of your life? 

Ocean Vuong: I never knew. I don’t want to sound overdramatic, but every book I write, I assume it’s the last. I think it’s a class thing, or maybe a kind of fatalism. I don’t assume there will be others, because writing a book is a strange thing – it’s not exactly like clocking in at a job. It’s a performance. There’s an ephemerality to it. The book that people buy is a relic of that performance, but the performance is over.

A big part of this book is based on your experiences working in the hospitality industry, on minimum wage. What do you think this taught you personally, and what can it teach a person?

Ocean Vuong: Well, the elephant in the room for people working in fast food is that nobody wants to stay there. The fast food restaurant is not where they want to be, and there are very few jobs where that’s the case. There are some office jobs where you might not like your pay, but there’s at least a belief that you could move up within that space. Whereas in fast food restaurants, even people who were offered promotions to be managers turned them down because they saw how hard it is. You go from working $7.15 an hour to getting maybe $10, to be a manager of an entire shift. So it is very edifying to work inside a dead end, to try to make a life worth living for yourself when there are no ways out, at least for the time being.

History is filled with people who don’t get out, but history books are filled with people who overthrow, start revolutions, and move from rags to riches. Books often note the exceptional, mythological occurrences. But for the majority of people, it’s not about changing anything but making the best they can with what they have, and that is so thick in the air at a fast food restaurant. You dare not say, how do you get out of here? What’s the next job? It’s not a conversation that anybody wants to face, because they know that sometimes they’re in a cage, regardless of how free it seems at first.

“I thought we came to art to complicate things, and yet the most reductive lexicon occurs in the art world” – Ocean Vuong

These spaces can often be an incubator for intimacy – you can form close bonds with your colleagues very quickly. Why do you think that is?

Ocean Vuong: You can’t turn away from each other, regardless of your ideological differences. I worked with conservatives, I worked with evangelical Christians who believed I should burn in hell, but none of that was present [while at work]. One way that ideologies are degraded is through kinetic kinship and working side by side. A relationship comes out of it. I think this is where I feel the most hopeful, but also the most wary, because it proved to me that our relationships are more lasting than our ideologies. Compassion and empathy build on that close, symbiotic work. Meanwhile, our world is moving away from that. We are more and more isolated. We work from home. We no longer have to depend on each other outside of just logging our hours, or filing documents. In the fast food restaurant, you can see your co-worker losing her breath. You can see the sheen on her chest, underneath her necklace, which is a locket of her dead grandmother, who she adores. Those moments cut through, they demolish any fixed ideologies that religion or politics force you to conform to.

Class solidarity doesn’t seem to exist in the same way anymore.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah. I wonder what Marx would think – he famously said that capitalism would lead to communism, right? He thought that the factory could not hold, and eventually, human beings will be overworked, and revolutions will naturally come out of people being taken advantage of. But he didn’t anticipate where we are now, where it’s not so much about being overworked, but that our technologies have placated our impulses for change. We’re not overworked, we’re over-rested. We have so much lethargy – from our technologies, our iPhones harvesting our dopamine levels for ad money – that we become less of a labour force and more of a commodity.

Marx’s central argument was that we want to give people leisure. Now we don’t have exactly leisure, we have a kind of static entrapment. We are rested, but we are tied to these larger dopamine attention systems that keep us in a stasis. So I don’t know whether that solidarity could happen now. I’m perhaps more pessimistic about it, but I think there should be a critical mass. It’s happening, slowly. People are starting to ask, what is the point of all this? Technology has just led us to more alienation, America is more divided now than ever, perhaps since the Civil War. We’re at the dawning of that very, very difficult conversation.

There’s also the growing rift between generations, and at the centre of this book, there is a very important, transformative intergenerational relationship between Grazina and Hai. Why did you want to explore this? What do these characters teach each other?

Ocean Vuong: Well, it comes out of this impulse to resist the easy labels put on someone like myself: marginalised, gay, queer, Asian American, working class, whatever. I think on one hand, you can just keep working [within those labels] and produce work, and the industry will be satisfied with that. But it would be a great missed opportunity to be an outsider and not extend that empathy to other outsiders, to widen the scope of what life is outside of the centre. I was finished with this idea of telling ‘the Vietnamese American story’ with my first novel. I wanted to apply that empathy to other communities that I don’t belong to, particularly the elderly.

When I entered the literary world in New York, all of a sudden, everything was presented to me in such reductive, monolithic ways. People say, what about a white audience? What about an Asian American audience? A Black audience? I thought we came to art to complicate things, and yet the most reductive lexicon occurs in the art world. Growing up in Hartford, Connecticut – this working-class, post-industrial city full of blight – the first white people I saw were refugees from the Balkan wars in the 90s. They all had no English, they had traumas, just like my grandmother and my mother had. And so to me, it was such a quintessentially important and pivotal education, where I realised that we are contingent on our histories. Our contingencies map who we are, rather than these labels that the culture likes to traffic in because they’re easy to manipulate, and they move units or get clicks. But I never saw the world, particularly the racial world, as reductive as it was presented to me. I was actually surprised, because you have this working-class shame, and you think you’re going to enter the art world to know more, to get a better education, a better understanding of the world. And I quickly had to reckon that a lot of that world is lacking in consideration.

There’s also this idea of a ‘rock bottom’ or breaking point, which your characters always seem so close to the brink of: Hai begins this book ready to jump off a bridge. Why are you so drawn to this emotional space? What can these dark times teach us about ourselves?

Ocean Vuong: Well, if you’re not asking how to get out of here, then you’re not paying attention. You’re not asking, is there anything else? I was interested in starting a book with suicide, because it was a very deeply personal part of my life: my uncle took his own life in 2012 when I was 24, he was 28. We were really brothers, because we were so close. We were in the refugee camp together. I also had friends who took their own life in high school. And in culture, in news reports, even in films, usually the story is about someone being talked off the bridge. When someone gets talked away from the ledge, we all clap. I always wondered whether we’re really clapping for that person, or if we’re just clapping for ourselves. Are we clapping out of relief that the social norm has been restored? Because nothing says all this is an illusion than a person standing on a bridge. It means that this whole shtick is not going well, at least for some of us. But what happens on day two for the person who decides, thankfully, to turn away from ending their life? What happens on day three? Day four? I never got to ask that of my friends and my uncle. The next best thing for me was to ask it of my characters.

“We are saved not by a big thesis, but because we realise that we’re actually much more useful to other people sometimes than we are to ourselves”

The idea of kindness is explored a lot in this book; the way we treat others when we can expect nothing in return. To what extent do you think kindness is innate in all of us?

Ocean Vuong: Well, I’m a Buddhist, and in Buddhism, we believe in something called Buddha Nature, which is that goodness is a seed. We try not to say things like, ‘they can be good,’ we always say ‘they are good.’ The goodness is already there, it just has to find its water. It has to blossom out of even the worst of us. It’s a difficult concept for anyone, right? But in Buddhism, it’s very important not to conflate evil with people. There are evil ideas, but there cannot be evil people. Buddhism sees these things more like weather systems. The good seed is there, it just gets obfuscated by fog and tough weather. Sometimes we cover the seed ourselves, we destroy it. But it always has the potential to rehabilitate. But you see this with children; there’s an openness to children, they always have this sort of innate compassion, and I’ve always wondered why that exists and why it gets snuffed out so quickly.

I’m fascinated that we evolved to have kindness, especially kindness that has no drastic power. It’s easy to be kind when you’re a billionaire, it doesn’t affect your material life. But what I’m deeply interested in is kindness when it comes at a tremendous cost to everyday people. Because I’ve witnessed it. Why did I see all my neighbours dig out somebody’s car at 4am in the middle of a blizzard so they can go to work and not lose their bonus? Or the tremendous moments of grace I’ve seen with my childhood friends, these boys that I saw in incredibly vulnerable positions, and the grace they give each other when they know they’re not being judged or they don’t have to satisfy masculine ideals. It’s actually incredibly powerful, and I think literature is a way to bring that to the forefront.

What about hope? How important is it, and where can it be found for people like Hai and Grizina?

Ocean Vuong: Well, I tried to resist the grand narratives. I don’t have a grand narrative on it. What I know is just my own experience, and it’s actually much smaller. We often think a reason to hope should be much bigger, but Hai doesn’t jump off a bridge because he decides to recommit himself to benevolence or he realises the truth of life. He does it because he sees this woman losing her laundry, and he forgets himself. I think we are saved, not by a big thesis, but we are saved because we realise that we’re actually much more useful to other people sometimes than we are to ourselves.

Time will push you into a situation where you will have to be useful to somebody. And if you’re aware enough, we all owe something to somebody, big or small. Time will bring you to those moments, and you have to act on them accordingly. I don’t know if I could say that makes life worth living, because there are so many people who work tirelessly for others and then lose themselves. But we don’t often think about how powerful we are in these small relationships, until we commit ourselves to these acts, and then we realise, ‘oh, I can’t die because this person needs me’. I think that’s been really true of my own adulthood. What else is there? If there is anything else, I think I have a lot of work to do here. There are a lot of worthwhile things to do.

The Emperor of Gladness is out in the UK now. Ocean Vuong discusses the novel at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Thursday, September 11. Tickets from £20. Southbankcentre.co.uk