Seen in a soft light, Ocean Vuong’s life looks like a modern American fairy tale. In 1990, he and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam. They landed in small-town Connecticut and began muddling their way through an existence limited by low-paying work and cultural and personal alienation. Vuong seemed destined to stay stuck on society’s margins. Until, that is, he discovered literature and his own enormous gift for writing.
Now Vuong is one of the country’s most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. a “genius grant”) and a tenured professor in the creative-writing department at New York University. His bittersweet debut novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a marvel of emotional and narrative compression published in 2019, became a best seller and, over time, a bona fide millennial classic. All this, and he’s only 36.
But there’s another side to Vuong’s narrative, one that doesn’t resolve so neatly. It’s that side of his history that informs his new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness,” which will be published on May 13.
At 400-plus pages, with a large cast of characters and comedic set pieces and touching on fast-food jobs, elder care and the static nature of most American lives, “Emperor” is a bigger book in every way than Vuong’s first. It also provided the occasion for what turned out to be one of the most emotionally intense interviews I’ve ever done.
Listen to the Conversation With Ocean Vuong
The poet and novelist on the real reason he became a writer.
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Your new novel is based in part on your experiences working at fast-food restaurants. Where did you work? I worked at a place called Boston Market and a place called Panera. I was living in HUD housing with my mother and my brother. It was this situation where if your family income surpassed [a certain minimum], then you can’t live there anymore. In the summers, I worked on a tobacco farm, which was $9.50 cash, no Uncle Sam involved. You confront, as a teenager, this antithesis of American prosperity and upward mobility where it’s like, “Don’t make too much money, or we’ll be homeless.” So I went to Boston Market, which is a very eye-opening experience of American life.
