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'The Interview': Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Sat, 3 May 2025
The poet and novelist on the real reason he became a writer.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is Ocean Vuong's background story?
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. In a lot of ways, Ocean Vuong's life makes for a classic American success story. He and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam in 1990, when he was just a small child. They landed in Hartford, Connecticut, and pretty quickly fell into a hardscrabble existence ruled by low-paying work and low expectations.
Chapter 2: How did literature change Ocean Vuong's life?
Until, that is, Ocean discovered literature and his own gift for writing. Vuong is now one of the country's most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a Genius Grant, and he's a professor in the creative writing department at New York University.
His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, came out in 2019 and became a bestseller and a bonafide millennial classic. All this, and he's still only 36 years old. But there's another side to Vuong's story, and that's about the flip side of success and the lingering pain of his mixed-up youth.
It's that part of his story, the one that doesn't resolve so neatly, that lies at the heart of his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. It's a bigger book in every respect than his first, in a way that makes Vuong kind of nervous about how it'll be received.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of 'The Emperor of Gladness'?
I'll say, too, that the book was a launching pad for what turned out to be one of the most emotionally intense interviews I think I've ever done. Here's my conversation with Ocean Vuong. So thank you for taking the time to do this. I appreciate it. Thank you, David. Pleasure.
Chapter 4: What experiences inspired Ocean Vuong's writing?
So Emperor of Gladness, your new novel, is based at least in part on your experiences working at fast food restaurants in small town Connecticut. So where did you work and what were the jobs there?
I worked at a place called Boston Market in a place called Panera. And I was living in HUD housing. It's a one-bedroom apartment with my mother and my brother. It was this kind of situation where if your family income surpassed, then you can't live there anymore. But the next housing opportunity would be unaffordable to us. So my mother literally...
said, you know, when you get a job, just work at McDonald's to stay under. It was, you know, McDonald's $7.15 an hour, which is minimum wage. And in the summers, I worked on a tobacco farm, which is $9.50 cash. No Uncle Sam involved.
So you confront as a teenager immediately this kind of like antithesis of like American prosperity and upward mobility, where it's like, don't make too much money or we'll be homeless. Yeah. But a lot of people had that predicament. So I went to Boston Market, which is now like a very eye-opening experience of American life, I think.
Yeah. What did you learn about people from working at Boston Market and Panera Bread?
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Chapter 5: How does Ocean Vuong describe his fast food job experiences?
Chapter 6: What lessons did Ocean Vuong learn from working in fast food?
Well, first of all, I learned that everything is about deception, right? We didn't cook anything. The entire thing was a series of microwaves in various, you know, it's taking frozen sacks of food in giant plastic bags, reheating it, and then presenting wholesome home-cooked meals. But what I learned was, you know, we have this idea of American life being the nuclear family.
But I think a huge portion of how this country is formed is through circumstantial family. labor, this arbitrary cobbling of strangers thrown together. And then we have to kind of sacrifice relationships with our own family in order to be here. And yet, intimacies arise despite that, because human beings, no matter where they are, will find bounding relationships.
And a month in, you'll start to know whose cough belongs to who. You'll know when, you know, Joe's drugstore deodorant will wear off at which hour, right? I'm like, we're at the third hour. I'm going to start to smell his BO underneath the deodorant. And there's nothing more intimate than that. But you also, you're so dependent on each other.
I'm not a soldier, so I would never compare it to war, but it's just kind of like going through a battle sometimes, especially when you're about to close and a purple bus pulls up and it's a bunch of Catholic school kids after their prom and you're slammed. And you have to depend on each other. And there's a kindness that arises out of that. There's also a deep frustration. What frustration?
Frustration. That underneath it all, every employee kind of knows that this is not it. This is not the way out. And it's kind of the elephant in the room. And the manager is paid just a little more than us. I think at that time, they were paid maybe $13 to $15. We were paid $7 to $15. So, you know, almost double. But the suffering that they went through... showed us it wasn't enough.
Like my first, I watched someone get promoted and then turn it down, right? It was like, we had this ceremony. We're promoting somebody and it was a grand thing where the manager came out. We closed the store and said, all right, you know, we're going to promote Jennifer today and welcome Jennifer. And she's just like,
I don't want it. Too much you didn't want the responsibility. You don't want the responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. It's a slightly different setting, but I worked as a waiter for a catering company.
Yeah.
And so much of what you just said paralleled exactly my experience of that, the way you're just sort of thrown in with this group of disparate people. Yeah. Somehow you make it work. You know, people get on your nerves. There's other people you like. There's people you can rely on. There's people you can't rely on. But at the end of the night, everyone has done their jobs.
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Chapter 7: What was the pivotal moment in Ocean Vuong's youth?
They're both in Connecticut. For 25 years, he worked from 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. I never saw him. I came home from school at 4 a.m. I only saw him on the weekends. He would sleep in. I saw, like, a tuft of hair poking out of the blanket in his room. That was it, you know? And so I just thought, we want stories of change. We believe in it. We buy it. And yet...
American life, even at its best, is often static. You drive the same car, I know people who live in the same apartment, but it doesn't mean that their lives are worthless, that it's meaningless, that they failed, right? So I'm interested in re-identifying the idea of the loser or loserdom, like economic losers, the left behind. In my first book, it's a queer story about someone who never leaves.
Because the queer story is always ameliorated when you go to the city. I'm like, some of us can't afford to. Some of us have elders to care. Some of us need to be gay in the cornfield because there's nowhere else to go. And so this book, it's not a spoiler to say that nobody gets a better job. No one gets a raise. So what happens? You get people.
And what I've been really interested in is this idea of kindness without hope. And what I saw working in the fast food, growing up in Hartford County, was that people are kind even when they know it won't matter. What is that? Where does that come from? You know, like, you know that whatever you're going to do is not going to help someone materially. Jumping their car.
I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards before anyone could go home. They could just dig themselves out and leave. go home sooner, hug their families. But they all stayed and they dug each other out. You know, the generosity that my neighbors had. Growing up in a black and brown community, we were invited into Baptist church. We knew no English.
They gave us free bread. And I just said, what is kindness that is exhibited knowing there's no payoff?
Where do you think it comes from?
I don't know. I write, you know, David, I've been really interested in kindness as an intrinsic thing and goodness as an intrinsic thing. Like my brother just has it. He came with kindness. I never had it. I had a desire to understand goodness. But I never had it the way like my brother does. And I know because I raised him.
When my parents were at the factories in an ale salon, we're 10 years apart. So I was holding a little baby in my arms as a 10-year-old feeding him milk. So I'm like, I raised him. I didn't give him that. He had it. And I'm just interested in that because I don't, it's strange to me. I don't know it. You know, it doesn't come natural to me.
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Chapter 8: How did Buddhism influence Ocean Vuong's understanding of life?
Yeah. You know, as we move forward, you should definitely just feel free to tell me if you need a break or if anything feels too intense. Thank you. Because I'm looking at my questions, you know, it's not going to get easier. I didn't think I would be here this quick either. But, you know, I realize in – the way I've described the novel.
I've elided one of the most important aspects of the story, and that's the central relationship of the novel is between a young Vietnamese immigrant character named Hai. Yeah. and an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman whose name is Grazina. Grazina, yeah. And high and winds up through sort of series of twists and turns becoming a caregiver for Grazina who has dementia.
And the novel is dedicated to a real life Grazina. Yeah. Can you tell me about who she was and what your relationship with her was? She's my partner's grandmother.
I wanted to dedicate the book to her. I wanted to use her name to honor her as a real person. But long story short, after I dropped out of Pace University, I lost housing. Then I applied to Brooklyn College. I got in, but I didn't have a place to live. I was couch surfing. That quickly ran out. And I hesitate to call myself homeless because it was just two and a half weeks.
I stayed in Penn Station for two and a half weeks. But it was not the way you think. I was a student at Brooklyn College. I had a library. I had a computer. But I would go to sleep in Penn State in the Long Island Railroad sector underneath Madison Square Garden. It's very warm.
And what I would do is I would print out a fake ticket, and that would get you into the red hat area where it's much more comfortable.
Sort of a waiting lounge.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would do that until like 5.30. Then I would wake up and I would take the 1 and 2 down to Flatbush, go to the library in the corner and sleep until my first class at 9 or 10. It's one day where my partner... We were dating at the time, and he was living in Queens, but he was going home that day to Long Island.
And I got to Penn State, and he's like, I'm going to Seaford. Where are you going? I was like, I'm here. You know, it was kind of sweet, but very strange in a way. And he was like, oh, my God, you know. And I was like, all right, well, he's, that's, you know, he's jarred and we left. I'm just sorry, just whatever. You wouldn't have to talk again. This is really weird. I'll text you.
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