The Brooklyn Rail

Summarizing the many narratives of Ocean Vuong’s remarkable The Emperor of Gladness in a paragraph or two would omit many rich, vibrating strings that are all the more beautiful for not being front and center.

I might suggest that this novel is about precipices: it starts with nineteen-year-old Hai on the edge of a bridge, assailed by rain and his own despairing thoughts, stopped from jumping by an unexpected interaction with Grazina, an elderly woman whose brain is on its own precipice, more and more unstuck from the present moment. Instead of leaping away from life, he swerves into a new one: as her caretaker, as well as a worker in a family-style restaurant in an economically-depressed hamlet. Yet such a description doesn’t do justice to the scope and impact of this intimate epic that offers a pitch-perfect exploration of the desperations and joys of small fading towns and the grace of those most people ignore. Perhaps most compelling is the unbearable love that Vuong has for immigrants, the chronically ill, working people, the often translucent load-bearing souls that keep this country upright—for all of us, really, we imperfect ephemeral beings—and for life itself.

What are the stories we must share with each other in order to endure, and persist? How do our rituals and litanies sustain us, even as our lives splinter off from the expectations of main roads? Doesn’t our despair shape our gratitude? As the following interview indicates, Vuong, like this novel, is full of multitudes, a talented novelist who is poetic to the depth of his double-helix. Hai thinks, “to remember is to fill the present with the past which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.” And yet, we also subsist on our memories, sometimes as anvils, sometimes as roots, even as sustenance, and in the case of this tender novel, as a welcome haven of literary sighs and recognitions.

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): There are a number of striking guiding constructions throughout The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean. One offers a kind of geometry, specifically a circularity that conjoins different narratives, events and times. Another that took my breath away is the beginning line, “The hardest thing in the world is to live only once,” and the last one, “Soft, simple people, who live only once.” When I turned that final page, I had to pause for a breath, two breaths, more, but then immediately started reading the book again. Would you talk about this? How did the beginning and end approach each other so magnetically as you crafted this novel?

Ocean Vuong: I have always been interested in exploring the idea of continuation, or reincarnation, using literature—particularly in the formal sense. How might a text resist arbitrary values regarding “completion,” “progress,” “finality,” and “closure” by approaching structure differently? One way to think through this is to suggest motives that involve looping, repetition or anaphora, utilizing warped and dexterous temporalities, or even leitmotifs that are somehow carried (and thereby transformed) across characters. But even beyond reincarnation, which can be a bit mystical, I’m interested in a non-religious, historical idea of afterlives. That is, the prolonged residual effects of war, violence, policy, and social changes that alter and inform the lives of a people, all of it leading to an ever-charged present.

The novel attempts to expand on ideas I was attempting to work out in my debut, which used the Japanese four-part form, Kishōtenketsu, to destabilize Western expectations (since I am mostly writing in a Western context) attached to the three or five act structures popularized by Aristotle and Gustav Freytag. For Emperor, I used Kishōtenketsu again, but this time attached the traditionally linear, outcome-oriented “hero’s journey” to the end of it, as a kind of fulcrum—or perhaps as an addendum. I wanted to see if Western and Eastern narratologies could be synthesized in some way, and to understand the potential impact of that hybridity on my characters. Though these modes had geographically vernacular origins, I have always been skeptical of dogmatic cultural associations to technique, and am curious if patterns can be breached via unfamiliar or even “wrong” deployments of varying plot systems. Of course, none of this is really new. Akira Kurosawa, for example, adapts Western narratives, particularly Shakespeare’s, quite seamlessly into his films about Japanese subjects, without forsaking their local ethos.

Rail: I’ve had the pleasure of being in the room when you’ve read from your work, and one of the unique delights of poetry is reading it aloud, alone or in community. Culturally, I come from a long line of those who regularly recite ancestral poetry regardless of their levels of education, or lack thereof. One of the unique delights of The Emperor of Gladness is how many passages lend themselves to the same practice. How much were you thinking of this musical quality? Do you read your prose aloud as much as you do your poetry as you craft it? There’s some mesmerism with recitation in general, isn’t there?

Vuong: Yes, the ear is an incredible editor, as my teacher Yusef Komunyakaa used to say. I think your mention of ancestry is also crucial here, since writing itself is still relatively new to our species, going back all but four thousand years or so. The act of talking and recitation is much older in relation and I think, as a motif, it’s a perennial concern in my work. I’m acutely interested in how speech acts breach physical spaces. The novel follows a group of fast-food workers, borrowed from my time working in fast food, but also my time working on a tobacco farm and my mother’s nail salon. I’m fascinated, not just by what I saw in those spaces, but more so by how people manage to say things in those spaces that they were not supposed to say, things that the people who built those buildings never imagined could be said inside them. There are entire rooms in our society built for the legislation of specific language: “I hereby solemnly swear”; “I sentence you to forty-five years”; “Congratulations class of 1968”; “Can I take your order?”; “Can I help you?”; “I’m sorry about that. I’m so sorry. I’m terribly sorry.”; “My fellow Americans”; “God Bless our Troops”; “The prisoner may now speak”; “Stand clear of the closing doors”; etc. But what happens to speech that breaks through the official context of a room, like when a co-worker tells you, as one did to me years ago, while we were both cleaning a walk-in freezer, our backs to each other, that he only loves one of his three sons, and that he can never tell this to his wife? Or another, during a smoke break, who said she wished she was never born, then flicked the cigarette in the air and walked inside before I could respond? Or another, a former sex worker who, between ringing people up, explained to us all, in clinical detail, her arsenal of fellatio techniques to “get ’em outta there in a half hour.” These moments of unregulated speech, linguistic interventions of official business, became endearing sites of agency to me, and one that I have been trying to think through in the course of my books. But these undocumented elocutions have historically been moments of potent innovation: think of enslaved peoples communicating in differing tongues in the hull of slave ships, or Vietnamese farmers who, during the war, embedded American troop movements into field songs as hidden intra-communal alarm systems. Speech beneath speech, “under speech,” if you will. To what varying degrees in literary possibility might that be used?

Rail: I loved the many literary references, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which famously has the line, “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Time is a loosely-woven construct in this novel, though perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it isn’t bound by the traditional directionality of past, present, future. I’m a bit of a temporality nerd, so I loved your exploration of time as a gerund that often loops like a rollercoaster. Through Hai’s coworker Maureen, you also offer a contemplation of splintering timelines, of the Mandela effect. Sony, Hai’s cousin, feels a bit “wobbly” when it comes to the make-believe, but this feels like hope to me. Where do you fall within the friction between the literal and the surreal?

Vuong: Like many writers, I think time, both as a construct and as a totally subjective phenomena, shifting in velocity from person to person, is a potent space to think through the human condition. This tension is further amplified by the sentence being a linear technology. Unlike sculpture or painting, the sentence, despite its circuitous possibilities via simulacrum, nonetheless achieves non-linearity via a linear trajectory. It moves on a track, if you will, vertical or horizontal depending on the language used. There’s a natural tension to explore malleable temporalities within such a rigorously “straight” form. These ideas are troubled further when we introduce memory and war, both of which are displacements, the former by choice, the latter by force.

Maybe the nexus of history and memory is why I am so invested in autofiction, which Slaughterhouse-Five embodies so brilliantly. It’s unfortunate that autofiction has been so misperceived in the West as being a “new” form rising to popularity in the early aughts—and worse: connoted with stories around white upper-middle class ennui, suburban vexation, self-absorption, and the guilt of political apathy—when the Japanese have been using it robustly for over a century, namely through Shishōsetsu, or the “I novel,” made popular by Natsume Sōseki and expanded further by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Osamu Dazai, Fumiko Hayashi, and, more recently, Sayaka Murata. The rise of its use in Japan was in response to the Meiji Restoration’s influx of sweeping historic reform, and with it the potential loss of Japanese culture from Western influence—which made autofiction and the self a potent stage to ask what might become of an individual under such violent change and national amnesia.

Though the Western critique of autofiction’s potential for navel-gazing might be warranted, I am disinterested in those critiques because they often fail to consider how such novels by people of color might be political acts of re-orientation against hegemonic erasure. For example, like the Shishōsetsu writers, I’m interested in setting my books within historical contexts familiar to mine and my family’s life because the stakes are both higher and closer to my life, in that a subject in history must now create a fictive simulation of their perception of memory—but with the artifice of artmaking, asking of itself: is narrative (i.e. mythology) a viable vehicle to understand history at all, which is in itself a form of fiction. Even textbooks and news articles can lie—and they often do—by omission. Autofiction, for the politicized, racialized subject, is inherently charged with historicity, animated through the context of aftermaths, even if they are not explicitly named.

There is a similar autofictive vein through the lyrics of blues songs and their obsession with naming the cities the speaker has inhabited and passed through. While this can be read as a casual tracking of travel, harkening to the American romanticizing of the “man on the road” trope, when we consider that the Black American body’s passage through space and time in the American South, particularly during Jim Crow, was an incredibly perilous journey, necessitating something like the Green Book to map its safety, the autobiographical self in these lyrics suddenly become testimony of the singer’s survival of American history. The song, performed, proves the endurance of its singer, and by turn becomes both witness and celebration at once. I’m interested in these alternative uses of autobiographical storytelling as expansive antidotes to the more narrow, white-dominated views that often prevail in literary discourse, which often establish a sub-genre’s standards within white terms, and only subsequently assess writers of color against those terms, when authorial impulses might not have ever considered those frames to begin with.

Rail: When Hai first meets Grazina, he says that “my dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable things.” I don’t confuse the writer with the narrator, but was this something you dreamt of when you were Hai’s age?

Vuong: No, I wish I was as thoughtful as Hai is at that age, but I wasn’t. I’m afraid I’m never as smart or wise as any one character—though I hope, on good days, I might be equally as smart as all of them combined. People in novels, being products of multiple drafts, are much more considered than us, I think—we who have to live but one wobbly and ever-unfolding present, full of regrets, intrusive thoughts, and failures.

But I was a skater kid, which I’m realizing lately has had a fundamental impact on my process. I have never been precious about drafting, at times even antsy to “fail faster” during the early stages of a project, which are the worst stages, since nothing is formalized and you’re kinda sculpting with water, things collapsing rapidly as you go. This should be quite precarious, and it is, but I always faced it as an inevitable part of the physics of making this kind of work—or anything really. And this ethos was true with skateboarding, where landing a trick was the rarest of achievements, one that shouldn’t realistically be expected during any one session.

To this day, there is no elation I’ve witnessed that comes close to the look on a kid’s face when he lands a trick for the first time, the one he has been throwing his body to the ground for months to land. Nothing. It is such a special thing I witnessed and experienced as a teenager that it imprinted itself on my mind and now radiates into my work. It is the look of someone who has thrown their sack of bones down a flight of stairs or a halfpipe, expecting failure—because who wouldn’t while fighting gravity—so that when it does work, when the wheels have that clean slap on concrete, and the full, resonate sound pops cleanly everywhere, something akin to miracle and mercy occurs, and the reaction of your friends, all of them who know the sound of the trick landing, some who had not even seen it happen, will drop their boards and rush over to you, their arms flung open, shouting and howling with joy, the personal victory suddenly a collective one. It’s as if the rare achievement reminds us that, because failure is, not so much a norm, but the very door one walks through repeatedly, success is the near-mystical agreement in a universe that has acknowledged your determination, and has rewarded you for it. And from it you feel both chosen and earned at once. In that way, I always saw failure as a major part of the work, the dominant, prevailing reality that outnumbers success. Indeed, this is intellectually true to the effort of writing—but I think skating cemented it as a physical and kinetic reality for me long before I wrote anything worth reading.

Rail: Would you talk about your own Grazina, whom you name before the acknowledgments?

Vuong: When I was a student at Brooklyn College, my feeble network of couch surfing fell apart and I found myself homeless for three weeks during the winter of 2009. I ended up sleeping in Penn Station (the old one under Madison Square Garden, not the new Moynihan Station). It wasn’t as bad as it sounds since I had access to an entire college and its facilities, so I was able to shower and sleep in the library during the day, as early as 5 a.m. and stay until 9 p.m. reading and doing my work. Anyway, I was casually dating this guy who was going to law school in Queens at the time. When he discovered I was without a place to sleep, he talked to his family and they offered me a room with their grandmother, Grazina, in Richmond Hill, in exchange for being her caretaker. She had dementia and needed to have a slew of pills each day. The guy I was seeing started to come over more often to see me and his grandmother—and soon we all started to bond in this organic but precarious way, as a weird sort of family. The man’s name, of course, is Peter, and he’s now my partner of seventeen years. I quickly realized that we were all refugees, just of different wars. This book is an homage to Grazina and her life, in a way, but also to the founding of our family.

Rail: One of the many lines marked in my copy of the book is: “Why shouldn’t the dead receive new names? Weren’t they transformed?” As a poet, you know the power of names, and you wield the nuances of such in The Emperor of Gladness. Hai—“The name, after all, was the only thing his mother gave him that he was able to keep without destroying”—is also known as Labas by Grazina, and I wonder, is he different depending upon each name he is called? As an immigrant, I often feel a fragmentation of identity, whether it’s how I’m perceived, or how I perceive myself. Amongst its other major elements, the novel feels deeply engaged with a multiplicity of selves, as much as it is with the variety of timelines. 

Vuong: I think, at my core, I write because I don’t know what else there is in me, that is, there exists selves or selfhoods in us that defy, even resist, categorization. Maybe writing a novel like this, with many characters, is to see how feeble and tenuous a self truly is. I’ve been deeply influenced by the work of literary critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who posits the idea of heteroglossia as central to literary verbalization. Unlike the polyphony of the Greek chorus, heteroglossia is the varying “voices” that a single person or speaker might possess, and how these “masks” are deployed depending on who we speak to and the context, creating a more robust multiplicity one might call “range.” This is a helpful response to the dogmatic assumption that literary achievements must be “cohesive,” “consistent,” “smooth,” etc. Rather, there is great potential in seeing characters as being in possession of several modes of speech, in the same way we are when speaking to our mothers, or our friends, enemies, the cashier, or the police. I was surprised to discover a Russian thinker moving against the Western ideal of a single, precious, and original “voice,” which is something we often fetishize in our culture, especially to younger writers and students. “Go find your voice,” we say, as if it’s some fully formed, inherently luminous diamond in the rubble, simply awaiting discovery, whose metaphor of commerce and possession should be noted. When in fact, the development of a distinct voice, at least from my decade-long experience as a professor at the graduate level, is actually full of labor, contradiction, trial and error, dead ends, and, perhaps most accurately, the accumulation of that into a debris of speech that accrues, briefly, like the crest of a wave, into an emblematic elocution before crashing into something else. And if we are lucky, this linguistic crash might be called growth.

Rail: You use seasons as section breaks in the novel, which marks the passage of one year in these lives, and also suggests the cyclicality of these lives, of our lives. There’s also something very sharp about seasons in the Northeast and New England, so many sense memories. How does place figure into your writing practice?

Vuong: One of my favorite philosophers, Kitaro Nishida, talks about how place (or basho) determines almost all of our phenomenological experience of the world, including our “place” in history and time. In my experience thus far as a human being, I’ve found this to be a more tenable connection between people, and less superficial than race, gender, or political world views. In other words, I most likely will have more in common with a person alive today than, say, anyone in the year 1285.

Some theorists have suggested that we even evolved to associate and commune with each other around a certain radial distance, bonding around our immediate environment, which becomes a kind of medium from which relationships are mapped, a community bathing in a river for example, or being microdosed by the same pharmaceuticals that have leached into our municipal water and can no longer be filtered out. In this way, I’ve found myself sharing more familiar concerns, vexations, and even fears and joys, with people of all types and ethnicities in New England than people from places I’ve never been, even if we might share basic social identity markers. As I grow older, I realize how strongly place determines my immediate experience of the world. When you have to dig your friends out of a Vermont blizzard so that they can go to work in a logging camp, or when you pack extra Narcan before going to a concert in a region historically decimated by opioids, when you can point to the mist rising over a meadow in the first light of a Connecticut autumn and your friend, who also lived there his whole life, knows so fully the awe you’re experiencing that you don’t have to explain it, when you know the people in rural New England to be the crankiest kind people you’ll ever encounter, place becomes a nebulous yet pervasive layer of identity that one cannot easily choose nor forsake, even if one wants to.

All this is to say, I can’t help but be a writer of New England. This place has held everything that was ever important to me, including my friends and family—both dead and alive—the fauna and flora, even my pain, my sorrows, and my dreams. I can, with my eyes closed, tell you what season it is by the scent of the air alone. I know many people don’t have such a stable relationship to a region. Hell, some of my family, after the war, never got to stay in any place long enough to love it. So I feel truly lucky to be able to live and make a life in the place I grew up. If I wasn’t a full-time writer and teacher, I think I would be a maple syrup and sheep farmer. One can dream.

Rail: Loss is figured throughout The Emperor of Gladness, from the literality of Sony’s “we’re still losers. All of us. All we did was lose,” followed by the playful “We’re short losers. Beautiful, short losers.” The loss of hope, the loss of life and heartbreakingly the loss of memory, in Grazina’s case, who says at one point “Will I see you again? Will you visit?” something I said word for word to a dying friend in hospice years ago. The older I get, the more I have lost. I haven’t become any better at losing people, quite the opposite. Would you talk about how this figures into your poetry and prose, and specifically what you wanted to impart through this novel?

Vuong: It’s so interesting you said that, about how you don’t get “better” at losing. You’re so right. How can you? How does anybody? But I’m thinking now of one of my aunts, who, hours after my mother took her last breath, when we were all sitting around holding vigil, turned to me and said: “Listen, I’m going to be sad for four months, but afterwards, it will fade and I’ll be fine. So will you.” The specificity of that time frame startled me—until I realized that she, being the eldest sister, had seen the most people die in our family, and had become a kind of veteran in death. She said it as if reporting on cloud formations in the distance, binoculars over her eyes. And I wonder, even now, if there is a number from which that threshold becomes as clear to anyone as it is to her. Whatever it is, I haven’t gotten there yet.

I used to really believe, when I was a younger writer, that the universal was false, that there was no such thing. That it was silly, even. But I realized that I felt this way only in relation to the Cartesian sense of “truth” as a finite and inherent concept, or Plato’s idea of perfect, complete “forms” existing behind the material world. Both these ideas insist that the universal is a teleological absolute, a destination. So I spent a lot of time rejecting that, like a good post-modernist was supposed to. But after witnessing my mother die, and three months later being submerged in the pandemic, where death became a public norm, I started to see that there is a universal in experiencing loss, of all kinds. How can there not be? Doesn’t the ant, tiny thing that it is, still run away when you slap the table, desperate to prevent its own cessation? How can we not account for that common ground?

I discovered, via a deeper engagement with Zen phenomenology, that another way to see the universal was not as a fixed entity, but rather the syntheses of self and object. The self not in possession of the universal but as a kind of filter from which the universal comes through. Art then becomes what’s enacted when the universal moves through an idiosyncratic matrix called expression. All these ideas, genres, are merely dust taking on brief forms through a person’s making. This fashions more agreement with what I’ve experienced in my short life thus far, that there is something to us, as a species, that is soluble, that even if I write something so esoteric and mysterious, it will still be understood, if for no other reason than that it came from a human being using the communal mechanism of human language, in the same way I have read and recognized the mystery in writers far beyond my epoch, who perhaps wrote without ever imagining a reader like me in mind. How else can that process be actualized without the presence of universal knowledge?