Buddhist Poet Ocean Vuong on Failure, Redemption, and Second Chances

Ocean Vuong: I’m starting to understand my obsession is as a writer, I don’t know if I’ve leaned into it enough in this book, maybe in my future books, but I think I’m deeply interested in a Buddhist concept of redemption, in that redemption can happen even after drastic failure, that you’re never out of it, you’re never in a forever hell, you’re never condemned from yourself, there’s always a way to redeem yourself, for anyone, and that is actually really potent for me as a thinker.

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen and you just heard Ocean Vuong. Ocean is a writer, professor, and photographer, as well as a practicing Zen Buddhist. His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, follows a friendship between a young writer and an elderly widow who’s succumbing to dementia. In my conversation with Ocean, we talk about how he incorporates Buddhist notions of emptiness and nothingness into his writing, the role of ghosts and the dead in his work, and how writing can be a form of prayer. Plus, Ocean reads an excerpt from his new novel. So here’s my conversation with Ocean Vuong.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with poet and novelist Ocean Vuong. Hi Ocean. It’s great to be with you again.

Ocean Vuong: Thanks for having me, James. It’s a pleasure.

James Shaheen: So Ocean, we’re here to talk about your new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. So the story follows the friendship between a young writer and an elderly widow who’s succumbing to dementia. So to start off, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Ocean Vuong: I’m always thinking about death, I think, perhaps in the Buddhist sense, which leads to thinking about reincarnation. My whole life has been informed by intergenerational relationships. I was raised by my grandmother, but also, you know, I’ve spent time volunteering in a nursing home, and I grew up with a lot of friends who were raised by their grandmothers and grandparents, particularly in working class Hartford, Connecticut, single moms, single grandparents, and I noticed that in our culture, you know, the very young and the very old are kind of pushed toward the fringes of society. They’re no longer in the center. The young are deemed to not have enough experience to contribute, and the old seem defunct. And I think the relationship between that, the foundation between that, is an immense loneliness between those two poles of our society. And I think to me, the tension and the common ground between those spaces is fertile soil to write about not only human life but human troubles. What good is hope when there’s no point of it, when it doesn’t drastically change your life? What does that mean? I don’t have any answer per se, but I’ve always been haunted by those questions.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, the book begins with a rather haunting description of the town of East Gladness, Connecticut. Would you be willing to read the first couple of paragraphs to give listeners a sense of the novel?

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, sure.

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.

But it’s beautiful here—even the ghosts agree. Mornings, when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth. Our town is raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England. When the prehistoric glaciers melted, the valley became a world-sized lake, and when that dried up it left a silvery trickle along the basin called the Connecticut: Algonquin for “long tidal river.” The sediment here is rich with every particle welcoming to life. As you approach, you’ll be flanked by wide stretches of thumb-sized buds shooting lucent through April mud. Within months these saplings will stand as packed rows of broadleaf tobacco and silver queen corn. Beyond the graveyard whose stones have lost their names to years, there’s a covered bridge laid over a dried‑up brook whose memory of water never reached this century. Cross that and you’ll find us.

James Shaheen: Well, thank you for reading that. Could you speak to this juxtaposition of abundance and decay and why you chose to open the book that way?

Ocean Vuong: That’s a great observation, James. I’ve always wanted to start a book in a way that only a novel can do. You know, as a writer, I’m sent a lot of novels and a lot of debut novels. And I think I always take a look, I open it. And I think that the trend—I think for me, the troubling trend is that it seems that novels are almost auditioning for their film options. And they always start with these very familiar film beats. You know, David Foster Wallace warned against this in 1990, and he said his generation would be the first to consume stories via film more than books, and what does that mean? He says that the novel is in danger of being derivative of film, and he famously turned the TV off in his home, and now it’s almost an uber realization of that. I just wanted to write a book that just felt like a book. And so I have this long, seven-page opening that becomes a portrait of this town, painstakingly detailed, describing its history, the decay, the life shooting through the decay, the seasons. I wanted to just sink into a time-lapse description, because I think description is autobiographical. You know, there’s so much revealed in who we are by how we describe things. What does it say about a person who describes stars as exit wounds? And I think there’s a phenomenological approach to that.

And then it goes back to Zen, right? I mean, what is the grass, as Whitman famously asked. And in Zen, we have to kind of undo grass. We have to forget grass to see more of it, forget the terminologies. And so I wanted to kind of sink into the descriptions but also forget story, suspend story for a while. We always think the novel should tell the story. But the word narrative from the Latin root narus is knowledge. So to narrate is also to give knowledge, and static description is just as propulsive to me as plot. And so that was the aspiration. It comes from, I think, fatigue in a way. But in another way, I couldn’t have written a book like this for my debut. I had to kind of earn this maneuver. I think if this were my debut, an editor would have come along and said, “You gotta get this bus rolling, you know, you can’t just sit here and describe grass for ten pages, it’s getting ridiculous.” So in a way, you know, you earn your strangeness, just like in anything else, right? And I think, for me, strangeness is one of the most valuable things, not only of literature, but of art in itself. The not knowing is what draws us closer. And I hope readers will be drawn into this little town.

James Shaheen: Well, the descriptions are fantastic, and again, the world you describe is a haunted one—there are ghosts of history and memory lurking throughout. I was wondering if you could say more about the role of ghosts and the dead in your work. You said that you think of death quite often. I know you have a death meditation practice. How do those things, ghosts and the dead, figure into your work?

Ocean Vuong: Well, I think history is haunted. You know, one of my favorite theorists, Mark Fisher, borrows from Derrida, and he talks about hauntology, or hauntology, as the French would say, and he proposes that everything we touch in the material moment, in the material present, has a history. You know, you drink a bottle of water. Where are the plastics made? What is the runoff made to that plastic? Does it run into a river, which is then harvested and poured again into the bottle? Whose river is it? Who lived there? Who was killed to possess it? Who is it poisoning? Who is it denying? I mean, who doesn’t get access to it? I mean, that’s one, a bottle of water. And of course, you know, if we live like this, our heads will probably implode on a daily basis. But a novel is a way to, similar to a film, it offers an alternative way to see time. And so the novelist gets to control where we focus, where we zoom in and out. And to me, that’s the hardest, history itself is a kind of ghost. The hardest thing to zoom in on in a novel is time and history, and yet, when you do so, it keeps giving, right? And I think there’s never a place that is unexamined that doesn’t have a haunted portion of it.

Fisher also talks about the eerie and the weird, and he says something really, I felt, unique, where he says the eerie is presence that fails to manifest. And he talks about ruins behaving this way, or, you know, forests without leaves, right? So there’s this gesture toward capacity, toward presence that fails to manifest. And then I thought, well, isn’t that sunyata? Isn’t that nothingness? I guess, is nothingness eerie? I don’t know yet, but it’s a new thought. But I think, for me, the eerie is very potent. I’m always drawn to it. I don’t turn away from it at all. When you see ruins, you want to walk up and touch it and run your hand through it, right? That’s presence that fails to manifest. And so in the heart of eeriness and discomfort is a kind of ultimate generative possibility in the Buddhist sense. I haven’t worked it out yet completely. Talk to me again in a couple years, and I’ll have a more succinct answer, but there’s something there. I’m just trying to lean into that.

James Shaheen: You know, I just had a conversation with the poet Arthur Sze.

Ocean Vuong: Oh, the best.

James Shaheen: Yeah, wonderful. We talked about emptiness and the fullness of emptiness, the potential, the pregnant quality of emptiness. And it seems to me that’s a little bit what you’re hinting at here.

Ocean Vuong: Yep, yep. And of course, Keat’s negative capability, right? I mean, my perhaps controversial theory is that all poets are Buddhists, but I’ll save that for when I get on my soapbox.

James Shaheen: Yeah. Whenever we say something like that, we’re accused of cooptation, but I get what you mean. So, you know, one of the major questions of the novel is how we live with these ghosts or how we live with the memories of loved ones who have died. And as the narrator thinks, and I’ll quote you here, “Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?” Can you say something more about this question?

Ocean Vuong: Yeah. I mean, having perhaps unfortunately, or on some days, fortunately, experienced death, perhaps not more than others but maybe more than most people who are 36, I don’t know. My first friends died when I was 14. My grandmother died. My uncle died of suicide. My mom died. All of those deaths were experienced differently. You know, only one of them had a deathbed, and that became quite a luxury to me, to have that moment. But you realize that when someone dies, there’s a kind of implosion, there’s a black hole that kind of occurs, and they draw things toward them, and it’s often people. At a wake or a funeral, all of a sudden you see people.

When my uncle died, we had only known him as my uncle, this very tortured, bipolar, deeply suffering person, but when he had his funeral at the temple, there were all these women in their 30s and 40s who showed up dressed in their best, their nails, their jewelry. It was almost like they were all going to the club, to be honest. You know, it was very, very beautiful. And they were all his clients at his nail salon, you know? And I thought, oh, that’s right, everyone has a relationship with somebody. We are the archive. We are the library. You know, libraries themselves seem so immense, they seem so monolithic, they seem that they contain it all, and yet they contain so little because they don’t contain my uncle. They don’t contain his relationships with these people. And it was such an altering moment for me to watch these people who are not Vietnamese, not Buddhists, go to the temple in heels and then kneel and go through the ceremonies lighting the incense, and it was so touching to me. And even for myself, you know, there are always these memories that I have of the people I’ve lost, and I can’t even tell them to anyone because they don’t have it. And I think to me, it still haunts my mind, especially how I grew up in the early 2000s. There was no social media, there was no iPhone, you couldn’t just whip out a phone and take a photo of somebody, and if you did, lord knows if you can identify them, the phones were so bad, it was so pixelated. And so, oddly enough, for a lot of the people I lost, my memory is all I have of them. Sometimes in the wee hours of the night, I would go try to find them, or I would search if their family talked about them, but there was nothing, and you feel kind of psychotic. You feel like, Did I even see them? Did I live? Did I know them? But then I realized that for the majority of our species, people lived like this. You bury somebody, and that’s it.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, the main character Hai carries around this sort of sorrowful memory of the loss of a very close friend that you start to understand a little bit as the novel goes on. So he carries that around, and it feels like a very heavy burden for him.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, yeah, and I think we all have those moments. You know, I think grief is actually much larger than the word, and what I mean by that is that we don’t talk about—we only think people who are grieving are people who lost people. But I think there’s grief in losing your job. There’s grief in failing at things that society tells you you’re supposed to achieve. There’s grief in breaking up. There’s even the strange grief of losing what has been. You know, when I pass by Hartford, I live in Northampton, Massachusetts, and I work in New York City, so I pass by Hartford. It’s like the gate. I can’t go around it. And when I approach it, I start to see the beautiful architecture of the Colt gun factory with its Arabic totem on top. You know, it’s kind of surreal in a way that the most beautiful building is the building of death. And I have to close my eyes. Luckily, I don’t drive, so my partner is driving and I close my eyes, not because, you know, I’m not saying, “Oh, I’m just a sensitive poet. I can’t look at my hometown,” but it’s that every street corner I see, there’s a memory. I know what happened there. I had a memory, even a joyous one. My earliest memory of my life is sitting on the curb in Hartford eating sour red belts from a paper bag. You know, it was probably the last candy store that had these giant glass jars, and there’s a man behind the counter putting in a bag and weighing it on the scale. It felt like it could have been sixty years ago, but that was my first memory of America. My first memory of my life was an American memory. But somehow it’s sad. It’s filled with grief to me. I don’t really know why. The Japanese would maybe call it mono no aware or ma or yugen, maybe all of the above, but I just feel that if you look at memory, it is full of grief and loss, and we carry that weight with us, and language makes it shareable. You know, the beauty of language is that it’s a communal tool. A language is only a language if at least two people know it. If only one person knows it, then it’s a code. It’s no longer a language. And so I’m grateful to have this sort of grammar to articulate it with other people.

James Shaheen: Well, you’re talking about grief and death and closing your eyes, for instance,  for other reasons, I suppose, but we tend to avoid these things. There’s a cultural tendency to avoid grief and death and hide away any evidence of illness, old age, dying. In fact, you describe a nursing home in the novel as, and I’ll quote you here, “a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer—including family—that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?” Wow. I mean, because so much of what the novel is doing is looking at that head-on. I wonder if you could say more about this cultural tendency toward avoidance that you take on so directly in the novel.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, thank you for that. I think it goes both deeper and wider in the sense that how can a culture that worships progress, money, and power not fear the aging body? It’s the reminder that all of that is impermanent and also that money, power, and progress, is for what? For what is the end of it? And I think it’s kind of antithetical to the mythology that we are often inundated by is that you work to get your golden years, to get your home, to prosper, to have a good life, to buy things, and commercials are seductive in that. You know, commercials use language too. I mean, they’re using Walt Whitman to sell Volvos. Right? I mean, I teach that commercial. It’s slick and it’s seductive and it’s so pop, my students are kind of in awe of it. Because it equates buying with freedom. And I think what was really interesting to me when I volunteered in a nursing home was that, in one way, it was antithetical to the American dream, or the American nightmare, or whatever you want to call it. On the other hand, it was kind of like the truest version of America, because it was the only place where everyone was truly equal, perhaps even in the biblical sense, if you will. You know, you had pilots, small-time politicians, janitors, former school teachers all in one cafeteria, on one plane, eating the same pudding. And it was a depressing kind of view of it, but it was ironically the most American place I have ever been. And I think to me, bringing that forward and saying this too is who we are is the potential work of the novelist. Not every novelist has to do that, but I’m interested in going to the heart of all the broken things.

It’s interesting, my mother would tell me that when I was little, I was obsessed with roadkill, and that’s usually a sign of psychopathy, so who knows, the jury’s out. I mean, I didn’t do anything, I just looked at it. There was something about it that I just said, how could this be? What’s the end of this? What’s after this? I don’t know. I was just always thinking that as a little kid, and now I have a framework and Buddhism gives me a framework to think through impermanence.

But, you know, there was that moment a few months ago where President Carter was going to his wife’s funeral and was wheeled out to watch the eclipse, and the culture kind of erupted and said, “How dare they do this to him? How dare they show us that? He should be put away. No cameras should show this.” And I thought it was such an incredible collective moment of death meditation, to see that underneath the surface, there’s still a consciousness. There’s still a being, you know, and I think we’ve lost sight of that, right? We’ve fallen into the hallucination that all things are solid, all phenomena are fixed. And as they decay, the consciousness is still there. There’s a kind of dichotomy between the two. And having the culture reckon with it but also seeing the open disgust and vilification is very symptomatic of who we are. I don’t blame people for it because, like I said, this is a natural byproduct of living in a culture that worships white-knuckle progress and power and money and success at all costs. So, I’m not surprised, although I’m worried that it’s symptomatic of deeper struggles within our soul, if you will.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I suppose seeing that is a reminder, an unwelcome reminder, that this is where we go. If we’re lucky enough to live that long, that’s where we end up.

Ocean Vuong: Absolutely. If we’re lucky enough, that’s the North Star.

James Shaheen: Right. So, this book seems to be haunted, the characters are haunted by war, Hai’s family by the Vietnam War, Grazina by the atrocities of the Second World War, Hai’s cousin’s obsession with the Civil War, which was actually a lot of fun to read. and the novel itself is set against the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan. So can you say something about that?

Ocean Vuong: Well, I think human life and storytelling is a story of war. It shouldn’t be that way, as far as in my opinion, but it is that way. So our job is to live in the aftermath and ask questions in the aftermath. Some people theorize that it should be that way, or rather it’s inevitably that way, because we evolved from apes who scientists have observed to wage small wars against each other. And there’s an interesting kind of questioning as well. If we evolved out of, you know, parrots, maybe there wouldn’t be war. Maybe the war seed came before the Homo sapiens manifestation. Who knows, right? But there’s an interesting kind of negotiation between how natural is it in us? There’s also an interesting fact around World War II wherein American soldiers, it was estimated that they only fired their guns a quarter of the time. And so if you’re part of the war machine, that’s a defunct weapon. Your weapon is literally jamming. But if you’re a person, a human, like myself, you know, that’s actually a really beautiful fact that we are not meant to do this. Even men trained to kill have a hard time doing it. In the Civil War you have anecdotes of how after battles you would see rifles jammed full of bullets, right? They just kept shoving it down with the rod and never fired. That’s a very common anecdote. And so there’s this, on the one hand, is it natural? We’ve done it enough, all the way back to the Iliad, right? War stories become flags from which civilization is planted. And it starts to define who we are and what we value. And America is no different. You ever try to buy a house in America, and all of a sudden you’re in a war zone, right? Is it pre-war, post-war home, antebellum property, right? Our economy is run by it, is determined by it. And so I think that is also part of the haunting as well, but also the strangeness of having the same repetition in the family unit. You know, Grazina fled Stalin during World War II, and her life almost mirrored Hai’s grandmother’s life. These are two women from two different continents, twenty or thirty years apart, and they both ended up in America. And their history is almost exact, right? Marx says history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, and then there’s this kind of almost comical Shakespearean part of it, where it’s like, how can it be? How can it be so exactly the same script, the same PTSD, the same incidents of families stuck under rubble, right? But that is the part of the brutality of the 20th century is that never in our species have we been able to create instant ruins. Before ruins took hundreds of years to create, and now there’s almost this magic spell of violence where ruins can appear instantaneously.

James Shaheen: You know, in the novel, as we read along, these wars start to all blur together, there’s just this idea of war, and Hai responds to Grazina’s fading memory by going back into the past with her and creating new narratives of survival. So can you say more about how these characters find meaning in the parallels between different stories of struggle?

Ocean Vuong: So what Hai realizes is that dementia is its own world, and the reality is that people with dementia can’t choose which world. Having friends and relatives who lived through that, I’ve seen it firsthand that they are literally thrown. They are ejected from the present into an elsewhere. And sometimes it’s not the past, it’s truly an elsewhere, which then is reminiscent of the bardo, this idea that when the consciousness is out of body, the body is no longer stuck in time and space. The consciousness is just, when you think it, it is. Thought is in the bardo, and it becomes this kind of hyper hallucinatory, pyrotechnic, kaleidoscopic horror in a way. And what I’ve noticed with folks in dementia is that they’re actually heading there sooner than us. The body with the physical neurons and the holes in the brain with frontal lobe dementia, it’s creating a kind of other consciousness. And then what I wanted to have was the character kind of meet the person there, because if someone can’t choose where their memory is, then you have to go there with them. And then it becomes a meditation on fiction, on storytelling: What is real? What is unreal? What is a hallucination? And then you arrive again at a very Buddhist center, which is a Buddhist phenomenology: What is the real, and is it all just a projection of the self? The particular is the universal manifested through perception. I think at the end of it, everything comes back to my understanding of Buddhism.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s interesting because when I was reading that many years ago, when people suffer from dementia, people would try to bring them back to reality. They would try to snap them out of it. Nowadays, or at least my experience has been when dealing with people who have dementia, it’s much easier just to go along with it, go along with their reality for that period, rather than violently try to shake them out of something that they’re seeing or hearing.

Ocean Vuong: I mean, it’s a kind of tyranny to enforce your reality. Again, Buddhism would say that neither of you are right. The person experiencing dementia is experiencing a hallucinatory reality, and so are you, right? So are we. We are also experiencing a hallucinatory reality, and just because it doesn’t jive doesn’t mean you have to pull that person into yours. It just so happens that this world works with the assumption that this is the real and it should be the only reality. But I think illness is to a larger extent the disruption of monolithic hallucinations, the disruption of hegemony. The failing body, whether it’s dementia or cancer or chronic illness, is a kind of intervention to the false mythology that everything should be as it is. Because it never was. Cells move and change. Atoms move. I mean, the greatest realization of my adult life is realizing that there are no straight lines. The physicists have finally agreed that there are no straight lines. We assume there are because we’re just so far away from the atoms. But if you go closer, everything is wobbling. Everything wobbles. And I think poets, we’ve known that for a while. We were just waiting for science to catch up.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, in Ruth Ozeki’s last book, I interviewed her about that, and there is someone in the book who falls out of the consensus narrative, and rather than treat it as on the spectrum or any other thing, that reality is accommodated. It’s similar. It’s not dementia, but it’s a similar alternative narrative. But, you know, you mentioned the role of storytelling, and I should mention that Hai is a writer or an aspiring writer, or it’s expected that he will write. He shows a talent for literature. And he and Grazina each explore their own ways of how art making can be a form of survival, and at one point, Grazina describes writing as casting spells. It seems almost like a ritual or a prayer. I wonder how you think about the relationship between writing and ritual and if writing can be a form of prayer or spell-casting.

Ocean Vuong: Oh, that’s a great question. I think so. I mean, there was this experiment that comes to mind where there were two mice, and they recorded scientists handling the mice to put them in a maze, and every time they put two mice, all kinds of mice, there’s one slot that they labeled “ordinary mice” and another slot labeled “extraordinary mice.” So they would funnel random mice through both slots through the maze, and the scientists handling them would then put them in the maze. And the smart mouse, or the mice that were in the smart box, almost always won. It turned out that they weren’t any smarter, but that they were handled with, perhaps imperceptibly, or at least imperceptibly to us, more care. They were just a little more zhuzh that they got from the scientists. So it was interesting because it was a blind study, so the scientists didn’t know what was supposedly achieved, but it was actually them. They were the experiment. It’s fascinating what language does, right, with the good mouse, the bad mouse. Naming is a huge part of Vietnamese culture and also speaking. So like you never speak of death at the dinner table. If you’re climbing a mountain, you don’t speak of falling or heights, you know, because it comes to you. If the word manifests as sound, then it begins the process, almost a karmic process, the butterfly effect, if you will, of creating this ripple effect, which will manifest it, right? And who knows if it’s real or not, but I prefer to live that way. Living that way, whether it’s a truth or not, makes me more careful as a writer, which is helpful, and not only as a writer but as a person. I’m more deliberate with what I say and what I do, which is helpful as a meditative practice. And of course, right speech in Buddhism, I mean, many people think Buddhism is full of rules. You know, we’re obsessed with numbers. There’s a number for everything. But I think what it is it’s just guided meditation. If you think of all of these rules as guided meditation for yourself, you’ll start to see them as just recommendations on how to think more clearly. It’s not like you destroy anything, right? The body in the present has always a chance at redemption. And I think that’s ultimately what I’m starting to understand my obsession is as a writer, I don’t know if I’ve leaned into it enough in this book, maybe in my future books, but I think I’m deeply interested in a Buddhist concept of redemption, in that redemption can happen even after drastic failure, that you’re never out of it, you’re never in a forever hell, you’re never condemned from yourself, there’s always a way to redeem yourself, for anyone, and that is actually really potent for me as a thinker.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you mentioned second chances, and that’s what I hear you describing right now. Is that right?

Ocean Vuong: Yeah.

James Shaheen: So you said the word naming, and I want to hold on to that for a moment. The book seems to explore how naming can be a way of creating kinship or even attempting to alter one’s path. Grazina rechristens Hai Labas, which means hello or hi, which is a moment of humor in the book, Hai’s cousin is named Sony as an aspiration for future wealth, which you say is not uncommon, and Hai becomes Sergeant Pepper whenever he ventures into the past with Grazina. So can you say more about the role of naming in the novel, especially with regard to forming chosen family?

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, I mean, gosh, you know, children often name their imaginary friends, and sometimes they rename themselves like, “Oh, my name is this now,” and it has such a dizzying power. My own grandmother was simply born as Seven, the number seven. She was the sixth child. So the first child is number two after the parents, usually the father in patriarchal paternalistic Vietnam, and so she was named Bảy, seven. And when she left the countryside, she decided to name herself Orchid, which is the most extravagant, robust, flower, and that’s why I always say that, look, I come from illiterate women, but I’m not the first poet. They were poets before me. And then she decided to name all of her children flowers. My mother’s Rose, my aunt is Lotus, there’s another named Tulip. So it’s just this incredible effect. And I saw it all over the world and in my own life. And that moment of, the fancy word for this is catachresis, which is when a word is misused or misunderstood by Grazina, where he says, “My name is Hai,” which means the sea in Vietnamese, and she thinks he’s saying hello, and she says, “Well, hello is labas in Lithuanian, so your name is Labas.” And he kind of goes with it because he realizes, “Oh, I’m in a third space now. I’m not home. I’m not in the world. I’m in her world. I’m in her home,” and you have to meet people where they are, and that means changing your name. So many Vietnamese folks in the diaspora changed their names when they came to America. Some of them don’t have birthdays. And so, you know, the inside joke for a lot of folks in Vietnamese communities is that everybody’s born on January 1st because the government just gives us that birthday. You know, my grandmother and my uncle were on January 1st, so New Year’s was a big birthday for a lot of Vietnamese folks. But naming is a kind of a way to set a new path for yourself because it’s often the first word in your life. It’s the one that you are called, you’re called forth, and to control how you are called is in a way to control where you’re headed and who is calling you. And I think I really, to me, in all of my work, that’s always a really important factor. I had a poem in my last collection, and it was, in a way, just all names. It was the names of items that a woman who worked in a nail salon would buy on an Amazon list, and it starts to narrate her eventual illness from cancer and death. And so naming also has cultural significance. I mean, when we say, you know, Hai or Jonathan or James or Sarah or Jose or Migwe, the whole world becomes clear and distinct, and cultures come into the forefront.

James Shaheen: You know, one of the most touching aspects of the book, and it’s again at once bleak and hopeful, is how strangers come to care for each other, whether it’s Hai’s unlikely bond with Grazina or Hai’s coworkers at a fast food restaurant, which was so excellently described. I worked in one many, many years ago when I was in my late teens.

Ocean Vuong: Which one? I gotta know now.

James Shaheen: It was this place in San Francisco called Mama Parmigiana. It was not a chain, but it was one of those types of places where you’re slinging pasta and strange sauces that are there for days. But anyway, at the end, you borrow a line from The Brothers Karamazov, which is one of my favorite books, anyway, and it’s this, and it’s spoken by Hai’s mother: “‘But don’t be afraid of life, son,’ Hai’s mother tells him. ‘Life is good when we do good things for each other.’” So could you say more about this? Because it seems to run through the book. You can say this is a very bleak and depressing kind of a story, but it’s not. There’s this hope, and there are these kernels of kindness.

Ocean Vuong: Yeah. Dostoevsky’s Karamazov is a foundational work for me, as it is for many people, and Alyosha, our protagonist, says that at the end to the children that gather around him, and he kind of earns that utterance, right? It wouldn’t have the same power if he said that on page four. And so he comes to that realization. Dostoevsky named Alyosha after a son of his who died in infancy, so the parent naming is already part of that book and part of literature, and I just thought, oh, that’s what it is. I want to track Alyosha as Dostoevsky’s son, a historical figure, reanimated in Aloysia the good, hopeful, optimistic, moral priest in Karamazov, and I want to channel it toward my mother, and it’s another child and parent utterance. That last page was, in a way, an animation of what I wanted to say to my mother on her deathbed, but I couldn’t, because the context in a deathbed is that you can’t enforce the agenda. You have to meet the dying where they are, and the conditions never arose for us to say those things to each other. But it’s something, it was interesting, when I was rereading Karamazov, I found that and I said, that’s exactly what she would say. My goodness. That’s just as true to my mother as it is for Alyosha, right? And so the book allowed me to have her say what she probably would say in that conversation.

James Shaheen: OK, so I know we’re running short on time, but I’d just like to ask two more questions, and one of them is about memory. There are two things that I’ll quote. The first is, “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, Hai thought, by remembering.” And the other one is spoken by Grazina, who asks Hai, with reference to her dementia, whether a life you’ve forgotten can be a good life. Those two statements jumped out at me. Can you say something about that?

Ocean Vuong: Yeah, I mean, gosh, remembering is also tied to reading, I think. Because there’s a great book by a graphic designer named Peter Mendelsund, and it’s called What We See When We Read. He makes this beautiful argument that I think actually really informed how I write, because I read that book maybe twelve years ago. And he says that when we’re reading something, we actually call from the recesses of our mind to build it. So if I say, you know, “sunset on a beach,” already, you and I have two different sunsets, two different beaches. Maybe mine has a violet tint, yours has a different color. So the same language, the same word, is now eliciting two different realities, two different dreams. And so we’re building as we’re reading, and in a way, we remember as we read. But that also means that we are not here. Our mind’s eye has departed the present and has gone elsewhere, and that’s very costly. And so to remember is to really supplant the present, to lose your current self. And I think that, you know, not to be too hyperbolic, but that takes an immense commitment. It takes courage and it takes an incredible amount of care if you’re the writer, right? If you’re going to ask the reader to go elsewhere, you better have something worthwhile to be in. And so that propels me to write with the best sentences as I can. And dementia is also that kind of ejection, as I said before, from that.

James Shaheen: OK, so one last question. There’s a scene that takes place in a slaughterhouse, and the ghosts of the hogs who are slaughtered recur throughout the book, which reminded me of being on the receiving end of an impassioned talk on animal slaughter by Thich Nhat Hanh and the poisonous violence that underlies our daily lives. This doesn’t rest easy with Hai, and it comes up in different ways, but at one point the narrator’s mother admonishes Hai to pray for the souls of the pigs being killed, and of course he forgets, but in some ways the writing about them feels a bit like a prayer. So could you say more about this? There’s almost an animism at work here.

Ocean Vuong: Oh, thank you for that observation. I think I’m always interested in human interaction with animals and, on a larger scope, the Anthropocene itself. It’s usually what we’re willing to do to animals historically is usually an antecedent, a precedent to what we are willing to do to each other. And I think for me, it is kind of hypocritical and ironic that we often say it’s full of humanity and that something barbaric is full of animalistic tension, wherein it’s humanity that has the most animalistic tendencies. And so to me, I’ve always tried to write about animals as a way to map them into the discourse of human life, and so it becomes kind of like an allegory. These pigs who are raised to be slaughtered, who are named emperor hogs not because they rule over anything, but because they historically fed the emperor. It’s also another catachresis in naming. You know, again, it’s the Buddhist center of compassion. How do you use language to zoom in on that? And I just didn’t see descriptions of that in fiction, that show the reality, but also to not incriminate or vilify the people working there, because they are trapped in that labor that’s in a way forced the conditions of life, forced that to happen. And the culpability is decentered. And it’s really consumerism. It’s this hunger for flesh, the hunger for flesh that comes out of the bloodletting of our culture, which then elicits ideas of class and how the working class are thrown into the labor market to sustain the culture and the society, almost to no benefit to themselves. They slaughter themselves or are slaughtered. It’s a slower slaughter. You know, people in my community, my family, their health was decimated by years of working in factories, nail salons, breathing chemicals, and it’s a slower slaughter. The opioid epidemic of my youth slaughtered many of my friends for the profit of pharmaceutical companies. And so in a way, the slaughter of hogs becomes this ripple effect that radiates beyond, and it starts to haunt every part of the human scale in our country.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, he’s not able to do this without great damage to himself, and really, he, like the hogs, is a bit of a victim here, if that’s the right word. So Ocean, in the past couple of years, you’ve wrapped up a screenplay for the adaptation of your first novel, you finished your second novel, and had a debut solo exhibition of your photography. So, if I ask, what’s next for you?

Ocean Vuong: Oh gosh, I don’t know. I generally don’t know. I write one book at a time. I don’t have a two-book contract. I never signed one. It’s important to me. You lose a lot of money that way. My family probably has words about that. When we’re trying to renovate or something, they remind me, often. But to me, I’ve never liked to live on promises, and I like to just live on one project at a time. I also don’t assume that because I’ve done one thing, that that’s an ontological vocation. You know, the books are events. They’re discrete phenomenons, right? They’re just like shooting stars. They come, and they’re just complete in themselves, and then who knows if another one will come? It’s random to me. The one constant career I would say I have is a teacher. That I can do. I can promise anybody on earth that I can show up to class and be useful to my students. But I can’t promise anyone, least of all myself, that I would write another book. I hope to. And I’m also not innately ambitious. I know it sounds disingenuous or coy or glib, because I’ve been so successful as a novelist. I know that. I’m not going to hide from that,  but I’ve never been impelled by my own ambition. You know, maybe this is the most Asian thing I will say, but I feel like my success and my accomplishment has come from trying to live up to the faith others have in me, particularly people I respect. So at every juncture in my career, when I’ve taken a leap forward, it was not my own volition. I can’t say that. I know the culture really wants that story, this kind of pull yourself from your bootstraps, self-determination, yadda yadda. But really, it was people who I admire, who are much smarter than me, who’ve done a lot of this work, who came to me and said, “I think you can do this. You should try.” And that Asian immigrant guilt that I have in me still, that I’ve turned to be a productive guilt, is that I’m like, “Oh boy, I better live up to this. If this person believes I can do it, then they must be right.” And that’s true with my poetry. You know, my teacher, Ben Lerner, came to me one day in the hallway by the drinking fountain at Brooklyn College and said, “You seem serious. We should do an independent study.” And I said, “What is that?” And what that turned out was me following him around Prospect Park while he just talked, and I just followed him with the proverbial metaphoric basket, and it was the greatest gift, right? And he also said, “This is how you be a writer. This is how you can teach and make a living.” He just showed me that. And then the novel was, you know, an agent reached out to me and said, “I read your essay, I think you could be a novelist.” I went to meet her and she was very convincing, and you know, I just respected her so much that I said, “Let me just really try.” Same with the script, same with my photos. You know, I took photos as a way to document my life so I can write about it. It was more like a journalistic, photo-diaristic practice, and really lovely folks who know much more about it than I do encouraged me to step forward with it.

James Shaheen: Where can we see those photos?

Ocean Vuong: They’re on view now at the Toledo Museum of Art until July. There’s a show coming up at the Culture House in Berlin. There’s also some appearing at the Frieze Art Festival this spring. And then the Peabody Museum will have a show, a group show, with Asian American photographers, which will then start to travel, so that’ll be interesting, and eventually, I would like to put out a book of photos, but I’m working on that now. We’ll see.

James Shaheen: Well, anything else before we close?

Ocean Vuong: No, it’s always a pleasure talking to you, James, and talking to the Buddhist community and centering the practice of dharma. It’s very rare. I try to sneak it into the other interviews as much as I can, because I do think, I don’t know what life is for, you know, I think maybe other Buddhists have figured it out. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I think while I’m here, I think it’s an immense blessing, and I want to be useful. I’m really interested in the idea of utility in all of its forms. Growing up poor, that was kind of a daily concern for everyone. How useful is this? Oh, you want to buy that? Is it useful? And I think we’ve let go of that. We’ve been very suspicious of that. I was talking to an artist the other week and they said, “I’m disinterested in utility. I want uselessness.” And I think that sounds radical, but I don’t know how true it could be in practice because I said, well, you still make art, right? And you still have an agent and a gallery and you’re paying bills and you have a CV, right? So for something that is supposedly so useless, there’s a lot of use here. I still think it’s a valuable idea to move toward uselessness, but I just don’t know how true it is in this realm that we’re in. So, maybe in another realm, in the demigods, that’s an exciting, fruitful meditation. But for me here, I’m really curious about how I can be subversively useful.

James Shaheen: Well, Ocean Vuong, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Emperor of Gladness, available now. Thanks again, Ocean. It was a great pleasure.

Ocean Vuong: Thank you. Bye bye.

James Shaheen: ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Ocean Vuong. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!