In his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, May), Ocean Vuong examines the interconnected lives of Hai, a young Vietnamese man contemplating suicide, and Grazina, a Lithuanian widow with midstage frontal lobe dementia, in East Gladness, Conn., a stand-in for Hartford. Drawing from his college experiences in food service and elder care, Vuong has crafted a narrative that subverts traditional immigrant story arcs to explore deeper questions about human connection and survival. A 2019 MacArthur fellow and a professor of creative writing at New York University, Vuong spoke with PW about youth and aging, labor, loneliness, and the people we meet at work.
The Emperor of Gladness pairs a traumatized young caregiver with a woman who’s losing recollections of the past. What is the role of memory in this book?
Is a life that you don’t remember still worth living? To me, the answer is a resounding yes, if only because someone else remembered it. Even though you lose your own memory, you owe your past effort to the people around you who sustain you. This novel is ultimately about how we sustain each other through service and unexpected bonds, and about how a life gains meaning through the people who remember it, even when memory itself begins to fade.
Your two main characters are at such different stages of life. What made you want to bring them together?
The elderly and the young actually have a lot in common because they’re both closest to nothing. They’re sequestered in two different kinds of loneliness, but there’s a similar ground because they’ve been pushed out from the center, they don’t make their own money, and they’re not at the peak of their economic potential. There’s also a concordance of their experiences, with Grazina having fled Stalin and Hai’s family, Vietnam.
Lots of immigrant stories follow a rags-to-riches path. Why did you take a different route here?
In my fiction, I’m just not interested in the self-improvement narrative or the narrative of getting out. It’s all about returns. As I grew up in my family and my community, the most common thing—the best scenario—was someone works the same job for 30 years, drives the same car, lives in the same apartment. That’s not failure. That’s a decent life.
How have you been influenced by both Eastern and Western storytelling traditions?
In the West, there’s this brutal, tyrannical approach to plot where, if it doesn’t fit into the system, you must cut it out. In the East, there is more fluidity. As an Asian American writer, one who’s often asking these questions, I find this geographical conversation fascinating.
Hourly, physical labor is familiar to booksellers. How did your experience in the service industry shape the way you write about work?
Labor and loneliness are the bedrock of American life. Your body and your self-worth are measured in time. And when you’re off the clock, there’s this pressure to be useful, to be active, which is not always possible. What happens is a lot of people end up in a static whirlpool of debt, which they cannot free themselves from. This book focuses not on the traditional nuclear family but on circumstantial family, the type of family you find at work.
You’ve had a long relationship with independent bookstores. How have they been important to your career?
I started as a poet, and indie bookstores were the first to open their doors to me. They were the first places where I felt seen as a writer. Bookstores don’t know it, but they are in a radical position. I see that now that I’m both a writer and in academia. In academia, you never hear the question, “What do you like to read?” In bookstores, you hear it all the time; it is the first question you get asked.
