Ocean Vuong is, without a doubt, one of the greatest literary names of our age. His past works have won him numerous accolades from major publications alongside a string of prestigious prizes, including the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award and the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry.
However, it is not this literary acclaim that makes Vuong so revered; as a queer Vietnamese refugee who fled to America with his family, Vuong’s heartfelt portraits of American life reflect an exceptional sensitivity and nuance. So as a long-time fan of his work, the opportunity to speak to Vuong ahead of the release of his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, was not only the chance to meet one of my biggest literary inspirations, but also to understand more about the thinking and creative process that went into making his writing so lyrical, sincere, and human.
We start with discussing the influences for The Emperor of Gladness. Centring around the unlikely friendship between Hai, a 19-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, and Grazina Vitkus, a Lithuanian grandmother with dementia, the novel showcases all of Vuong’s signature characteristics: deftness of prose, attention to the minute details of life, and rich, sympathetic characterisation. Right away, his responses about what inspired the novel were similarly poetic: “For me, the novel is a wonderful form, because it is very forgiving of multiplicity – a poem, particularly a lyric poem, can collapse if you put too much on it. I’m always asking my novel to hold maybe too much.
“But one of the central things I was thinking about is this idea of progress that we often ask the novel to perform – to me, it’s an arbitrary mandate. This false premise of ‘change at all costs’ is so worshipped in Western narratology. I wanted to write a novel that had transformation without change: nobody gets a better job, nobody ‘improves their life’ per se, there is no escaping to a city. If you deny all of that, what do you have? You have to have characters. You have to have people.
“I was [also] interested in the idea of reciprocal relationships and debts. What do we owe each other? What is kindness without hope? It’s easy to be kind and generous when you have so much to give, and that generosity also doesn’t impact your life substantially if you have so much. What I’ve been interested in, growing up in the working class, was how and why people are kind to each other despite the fact that their kindness does almost nothing to substantially change their lives. I don’t know the answer, but… it becomes a philosophical question that I have in all of my work: what is the function of kindness when there is no reward for it, when there is no hope for anything around it? What does it do? Does it matter? Is it futile? These are the questions that this novel particularly is interested in.”
I pointed out that this idea, of ‘transformation without change’, was not only counter to the pattern of the Western literary tradition, but also to the American mythos of meritocracy, and of the ‘immigrant narrative’ in particular. I asked whether he saw his work as opposing, or speaking back to this ideology.
Vuong rejected this idea gently: “I am very skeptical, for myself, of total opposition. One of my favorite British theorists, Raymond Williams,… puts a scepticism on work that is always in opposition to power. I know this sounds like a fantasy, but what he says is that if you’re always correcting, then you will always speak second. You will never get to launch the proposal as an artist. You’re always cleaning up the mess of power.
“We can’t afford not to do that in the material world – we have to vote accordingly, we have to fight for our rights, we have to be vigilant against the corrosion of civil liberties as is happening now in my country in America. But in art, we can; we can have this fantasy in art of asking the first question. When I sit down to write, I’m trying to get myself to think: what would I say if I could just say it on my own terms? What does that look like? Is it even escapable? We wouldn’t know unless we really tried.
“One could argue that because I come out of this dialectic of power of the West, my physical body is intertwined with empire. That no matter what I say, I will be in a corrected position because my utterance is working towards self-dignity, self-validity, self-preservation, and all those things would not be necessary without power. So there’s the aporia, but so far in my career, when I sit down to ask [myself], ‘What else do I possess?’, I find myself more satisfied as an author.”
Vuong’s critique of Western narratology is supported by a deep immersion within it, and a comprehensive understanding of its concepts. While this should have no means been a surprise – Vuong is the professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics at the MFA program at New York University – what was interesting to me was how so much of his reflection on writing was grounded in literary and critical theory. Musing on the storytelling convention of catharsis, Vuong mentioned that originally, Aristotle conceptualised “narrative as a way to ameliorate the tension in the populace… to absolve their vexation of the state or their personal lives; in other words, [to] vanquish any revolutionary feeling through catharsis.”
In another strand of the conversation, we talked about speaking to this audience. For Vuong, “literary production in the West, particularly in the Anglophonic tradition, is deeply rhetorical. Whereas at the same time, [there’s] Matsuo Bashō in Japan – you see the haiku poets, the Tokugawa period – and there are almost no rhetorics. There are no rhetorical gestures, it’s all image based.
“As a child in America, I was taught [that] you need to be convincing in your writing and you’re rewarded by that. The most convincing essay and short story poem was the one that got the best grades, was rewarded, won the prizes. I’m not interested in convincing anybody, and I didn’t know that you could do it any other way until I started reading the Eastern poets and about how influential they were.”
This lack of desire to convince was curious to me, given Vuong’s widespread acclaim. Clearly, his works are convincing, and to a wide audience of readers. His first book, a poetry anthology called Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016; it also won him the T.S. Eliot Prize and Thom Gunn Award, with three of the poems within the anthology winning prizes of their own. His first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, also saw its own slew of awards, and was named one of the best books of the year by major publications, including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. Despite all of this, Vuong admitted that the fame hasn’t affected him as much as he expected.
“I was expecting that to happen: this pressure of success,… having that paralyse you. I kept waiting for it to happen and I don’t mean to gloat – I think it’s more of a mental incapacity [for me] than any talent –” Vuong laughs at himself here – “but I’ve never been swayed by public reception or success because I don’t have a strong relationship to my work.
“I think I have a strong relationship to the medium, but I don’t feel drawn to defending my work once it’s done. It’s like little ships sent down river: my first book, [my] second book – they’re just down river. Some people throw glitter on them, some people throw tomatoes at these little rafts, but all that is fine to me. I think it’s a Buddhist thing, this idea of non-attachment: you are not yourself, you are not your work, you are not your ego.”
As part of this, Vuong explained, he did not consider himself to be intrinsically ambitious. “I know it sounds disingenuous and glib, with all the success my work has had – I’m not going to pretend that it’s not there. But I never thought I could be a poet until my teacher came to me and said, ‘I think you can be a poet. Here’s how you do it. Here’s how you make a living.’ I never thought I’d be a novelist until an agent, Frances, reached out to me… She just came to me and said, ‘I think you could write а novel.’ And I never thought I’d be a teacher and then someone said ‘You’d be a really great professor, you should try it.’; same with script writing.
“Also the books – they’re calcified. If I were to lean into this thought, I would say, ‘How can you associate yourself with your work?’, because the work is fixed in time. My last book Time is a Mother is a collection of photographs of my psyche in February 2022, which is when I handed in my final edits for that book. So why would I have any strong relations, or why would I feel beholden to what my previous self has done?
“…I think I’m more motivated by my desire not to let people who[m] I respect down, than my own ambition for myself. I was really ashamed of that early on. I just thought, ‘Gosh, I must not be a real artist if my own ambition is so weak.’ But now I look back – it’s been pretty productive, and I prefer that my motivations come from a relational crux, and that it’s about my relation to the people I love and people who believe in me. My desire to honour that is stronger than my private desires as an artist. I thought it was not very satisfying to have that as a motivation, but now I think I’m really proud of it.”
For Vuong, writing is an act of giving, a more selfless process than, perhaps, most writers are capable of. This idea also extended to his more recent photography debut in 2024, in a collection titled Sống. I asked why he had chosen to dip into the medium; as it turned out, Vuong had been taking photos longer than he had been writing.
“I’ve been doing [photography] all my life, but [as] a private practice. At first it was a way to make my region and my interiority legible to my family, who were illiterate and couldn’t read my work. I took photos to show them my point of view, and also to show them where we lived, because they worked brutal hours. They couldn’t walk outside at 2pm unless it was a Sunday, and even then, working in nail salons, sometimes they were working on Sundays too. It’s kind of mind-boggling to me, that so many of my family members working in factories never experienced laying down in a park in the afternoon – I know it sounds so, I don’t know, dramatic, but when I tried to recount it, I’ve never seen them do that. So I literally just went out to show them the place that they supposedly lived in, but had no phenomenological experience of.
“When I met Nan Goldin, she encouraged me to start pursuing it seriously. Again, it [was] just her openness, I don’t think there’s anything special about me. I think she would have said that to anybody who came to her and said, ‘I’ve been taking photos for 20 years’ and she would just say, ‘You need to lean into it, share it and open that up.’ So again, it just followed the pattern of what’s happened in my life, and my career.”
In another reflection on his photographic debut in Cultured, Vuong also explains that the collection was a response to other photographs he had been exposed to. In contrast to Donald McCullin’s photo of a dead North Vietnamese soldier, Vuong recounts, the photos of the nail salon were perhaps an attempt to remember and to capture “the Vietnamese faces that fed me, the ones I kissed, the brows I wiped sweat from while they worked, alive.”
I asked whether any part of this choice to release his photographs was because Vuong felt that words were, in some sense, insufficient. His answer was, unhesitatingly, that “there’s days where [writing] feels absolutely futile.” But, Vuong added, “I think that’s important, to allow it to be.
“There are days where I’m like, why am I doing this? Actually, a week ago I was feeling this way. I was like, am I depressed or am I just not believing in everything I do? And I think that’s okay. I think it’s healthy to question the validity of your medium, because then you can see the medium, right? We ask the art maker to make the world clearer. But I actually think art is the most powerful when it’s not so much the gesture of ‘look out the window’, but of ‘look, it’s a window’. The artist points more productively [in] pointing out the window, rather than through it.”
It’s a sentiment that Vuong has expressed before, in an interview about photographer Robert Frank. “What’s often not talked about in successful art-making,” Vuong said, “is daringness. If you don’t throw the dice, there’s no point in playing. You owe it to yourself to keep questioning whether what you’re doing is truly enough.”
All these reflections seemed to be coming back to the idea of pushing yourself, of extending the medium, of testing the limits of narrative in speaking back to power. I circled back to Vuong’s idea of ‘speaking first’, and what he wished to say, if he could truly do so on his own terms.
“I would borrow from Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, where he goes against this Hegelian dialectic of conflict creating innovation… Benjamin says, in fact, that the revolutionary image or the radical image is the one that’s ejected from that dialectic. It’s the one that is a rupture. It’s the spark when you’re sharpening your sword. It’s the new possible image, the new possible idea,… the ejection from the conversation. [This] is what could potentially spark a new fire and create an upset of systems. I really believe in that.
“I can see my own life this way. I am ‘ejected from’ because of the Vietnam War – [ejected] from the synthesis of Vietnam. I wouldn’t be alive without the war, right? I am a kind of error. And I’m interested in that, in the Benjamin-ian sense: error and errancy, circuitous lack of place as practice, as a potent site of making rather than deadness or wrongness or futility. I think the idea of being in the wrong place is actually an engine from which one can create.”
Vuong’s final response captured so much of what makes his writing so resonant, particularly to queer communities, to immigrants and the children of immigrants, and to anyone else on the margins. It asks to speak back to power, to reclaim some private, shared space where love, kindness, and generosity without reward prevail. It asks who we are, outside of the labels and stereotypes assigned, perpetuated, and at times violently enforced by the West. It asks, what could any one of us write, if we could also have the bravery to take on the endeavour of speaking first?
