After his mother's death, Ocean Vuong wrote his way through grief

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, a conversation with writer and poet Ocean Vuong. His new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness," is an exploration of working-class life and the quiet joys and devastations of caregiving and survival. It's set in the fictional post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, and follows a 19-year-old Vietnamese American named Hai, who contemplates taking his own life before meeting an 82-year-old widow with dementia who persuades him to step back from the ledge and ultimately become her caregiver. Vuong is the author of the bestselling novel "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" and the poetry collection "Time Is A Mother." He's received a MacArthur genius grant and has become one of the most celebrated literary authors of his generation.

The conversation you're about to hear is in two parts - first, the two of us in studio in Los Angeles, and then later that night, we spoke again in front of an audience of nearly a thousand at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in partnership with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Here's our conversation.

Ocean Vuong, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

OCEAN VUONG: Thank you so much, Tonya. It's a pleasure to be here.

MOSLEY: You were nervous about this next book coming out, and I wonder why.

VUONG: Well, I imagine every author's nervous because you put so much care and work into something. But I never expected to write on my own terms so soon in my life. You know, I - everything I did was for my family, and I got really comfortable with that. You know, it was never a burden. But then when my mother passed, I inherited my brother. My brother moved in. So my family got bigger. We moved, and I started writing this book January 18, 2020. And it was my way out of grief. I thought, OK, I'm fully an orphan now. You know, I said, goodbye, Mom. I'm going to write this without you. It's my first book from start to finish without her.

MOSLEY: Let's get into your origin story, which started in Vietnam. But you arrived here at 2 years old, lived in Connecticut, a small town called Glastonbury.

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: And the book is set in a fictional town, East Gladness, which I suspect is very similar to Glastonbury. Can I have you read an excerpt from the book that really describes this setting?

VUONG: Sure.

(Reading) It's a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfather's trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they're 30-something and the Walmart hasn't changed, except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces. It's where fathers in blue jeans flecked with wood stains stand at the edges of football fields, watching their sons steam in the reddened dawn, one hand in their pocket, the other gripping a cup of Dunkin' Donuts. They could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood. And each morning, you'd sit on the frost-dusted bleachers, a worn copy of "To The Lighthouse" on your lap, and watch the players on the field, blue tomahawks shivering on their jerseys, their plastic pads crackling in the mist. And when you turn the page, it would slip right off the binding, flutter through the field, gathering inky blotches through the wet grass until it tangles between the boys' legs and disintegrates under a pair of black cleats. The words gone to ground. That town.

MOSLEY: This town sounds like so many towns in the United States. In fact, you go on to also write about kind of the center of the town, where there are lots of fast-food restaurants, and the main character actually works at a fast-food restaurant. What strikes me is that so much of what is written about America and presented about America are the big cities and the big towns. But this reality is much more real and much more common.

VUONG: Yeah, yeah. And it's so seldom written about. I think we really fantasize the stories that have these escape arcs and these improvement arcs - rags to riches. It's so interesting because we see it in our films, even magazine stories, things that are written about me. Refugee kid makes good - right? - writing his first book. So the story, the profiles, are all around that myth. Meanwhile, I grew up looking around. All I saw was stagnation in American life, but it didn't mean that it was doomed. If you ask - my stepdad worked at Stanadyne, which is...

MOSLEY: What is Stanadyne?

VUONG: Stanadyne is a company in Connecticut. It's no longer there. He worked there for 25 years, and its entire manufacturing was to manufacture a single screw that went into gas pumps. And if you asked him, a refugee who escaped by boat, living - people, you know, relieving themselves on a tiny boat, throwing up overboard. Seven days he spent at sea. And if you asked him, did you manage to live your American life the way you wanted? Without batting an eye, he would say yes, because he said, I have a uniform. There's a stitching on the right chest with my name, my Vietnamese name, in diacritics. And he - our living room was so spare 'cause we couldn't hang anything up. It was a HUD housing rental. So if you want to hang something up, you want to put a hole in something, you have to ask permission. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. You can't paint.

MOSLEY: Right.

VUONG: You don't own anything. So...

MOSLEY: Exactly.

VUONG: We lived in a kind of - it felt like a stage set. It wasn't ours. But he would come home, and he put a thumbtack on the wall. He would hang that uniform every single day. And he said, I live my life on my term. That was my American life that I wanted. He had health care. He had a salary. It's very relative for me because when I looked at his life, I saw something full of loss. This man went to bed, woke up at 3 p.m. to go to work, went to bed at 12 a.m. I never saw him. He never saw his kids. My mother never saw him. And I looked at that. I said, gosh, my life needs to be different. Meanwhile, that was his triumph. And so, to me, growing up, I realized that there are many versions of triumphs, and I'm not interested in the American dream so much as I'm interested in Americans who dream because him and I had two different dreams. Both of them are valid.

MOSLEY: Well, one of the things that you do in this book through the story, too - the main character, Hai, he works at a fast-food restaurant. And so I'm thinking about your stepdad working in a factory. He had a family of circumstance, as well...

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...At work...

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...In that same way. And those relationships, they're so fleeting, but they can be so deep, as well.

VUONG: Yeah, because you depend on each other. And no ideology is strong enough to withstand kinetic kinship. That's what I learned working at Boston Market.

MOSLEY: Because that's where you worked for - how long?

VUONG: Three years.

MOSLEY: Three years, yeah.

VUONG: Yep. Yeah.

MOSLEY: You also worked at other fast-food restaurants.

VUONG: Panera Bread, as well.

MOSLEY: Yeah, yeah.

VUONG: Two very different places. But actually, two very different places because they serve different communities. One was more upscale. Panera Bread was a little more upscale than Boston Market, but it was still minimum wage.

MOSLEY: Right.

VUONG: Seven fifteen (laughter). So you still feel it. But you realize that people were kind of stuck. The shift was a trap. The fast-food restaurant was a trap.

MOSLEY: Meaning there was no place of mobility to move up.

VUONG: And everybody knew that, but we didn't dare say it.

MOSLEY: Hai, as I mentioned, the protagonist, he has decided that maybe he wants to die. And he's intercepted by this relationship with this 82-year-old woman who's suffering from dementia. He ends up being her caregiver. And every moment in the book as I'm turning the page, after I realized that, I'm thinking, he wanted to die, but he's living another day.

VUONG: Yeah. Yeah.

MOSLEY: And in that living another day, it's very much like that classic movie "It's A Wonderful Life."

VUONG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

MOSLEY: With Jimmy Stewart, you know?

VUONG: Yep. Yep.

MOSLEY: Where he says, I want to live. But there's something in it where these mundane everyday things now seem kind of beautiful...

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...These interactions he's having with his colleagues in this fast-food restaurant that are so deeply human.

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: It's almost a reframe...

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Of the mundane day-to-day life.

VUONG: Absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned "It's A Wonderful Life." There's a moment that I've been thinking about that I didn't put in the book because it's a little too dramatic, and I didn't know what to do with it. But there was this quintessential moment of these laborers coming together. There was a woman in her 30s, and we were closing up. This was at Boston Market. We were closing up for the night, about 30 minutes to close, and she gets this phone call on the landline. We didn't really have, you know, iPhones. And the phone call basically said her brother had overdosed. He's in the hospital. They're trying to do everything they can. It was her ride.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

VUONG: It was her aunt - supposed to pick her up every day. And she's like, I got to go. You got to stay there until I figure this out. And this is the early aughts. So our community in Connecticut was hit with the opioid crisis before it had a term, and it was like a bubonic plague. We didn't know what was hitting us.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

VUONG: And there was so much shame because you'd had lunch ladies, gym teachers. Everyone was taken out overnight. And we finished the shift, we closed out. And there was this unspoken reality. Nobody said it, but we all knew we were not going to go home. I still think about that. Like, we clocked out. We're not paid. The lights are off, save for the little fluorescent light by the sink. And we're sitting in this Boston Market just holding vigil.

MOSLEY: For her

VUONG: For her.

MOSLEY: And her brother, yes.

VUONG: How can you? I mean, but I'm interested in that. I'm like, where does that kind of kindness come from? Where does it? Who taught us that? It's like the elephants. Every year, they come back and they touch the bones of their dead. And the eldest gets to do it first, and they form a line. And I'm like, what is it about our species that came with that?

MOSLEY: This is a question that you've been asking yourself. I think you use the term what is kindness without hope.

VUONG: That's it.

MOSLEY: Can you be kind without hope?

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: There's sort of a hope embedded in kindness because there is some sort of faith in many instances...

VUONG: That's it. That's it. That's it.

MOSLEY: ...That really bind all of this together.

VUONG: That's a better word for it, faith. There's so much faith required in doing something, knowing there's no guarantee that it will pay off. I mean, we're told in this country that you have to pull yourself on the bootstraps, every man for himself, individualism. And yet, in the working poor communities, the Black and brown communities that I grew up in, the generosity came first. That sort of dog-eat-dog world was shameful. Class mobility has been really strange for me. I'm in these spaces where it's mostly upper-middle-class folks. Academia, publishing. And I found, like, a totally different set of ethos.

MOSLEY: And values.

VUONG: And values. And that ricochet, I was never prepared for - I'm still not prepared for.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, we're listening to my conversation with writer Ocean Vuong about his latest novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHM FUTURE QUARTET'S "IBERIAN SUNRISE")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I am talking to author and poet Ocean Vuong about his new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness." Set in a fading Connecticut town, the book follows a suicidal young man whose life takes an unexpected turn when he becomes the caretaker of an elderly woman with dementia. Loosely inspired by Vuong's own experiences growing up in a working-class immigrant family in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the novel explores themes of chosen family, survival and the quiet resilience of everyday life.

You're now in elite circles. You're teaching at an elite university. You are a bestselling book author. You grew up where your mother did not know how to read. You did not know how to read until you were 11. Your mom worked at a nail salon. And in these elite circles, they can read your work, but they'll never truly feel and know.

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: And yet the people that you grew up with, they feel and know. But do they care, really, about the things that you've seen, the stuff that you come home to share with them? It's a privileged place to be in.

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: Is it also a lonely place?

VUONG: It is. But I prefer that they don't care.

MOSLEY: Oh, say more on that, yeah.

VUONG: Because when I come home, I'm just one more. I'm just one more of the litter, you know? And also, here's another thing - why should they care? Just because the New Yorker says what I do is valuable, just because Time Magazine or NYU or Yale says what I do is valuable, why should all of a sudden that value system be foisted on them? They never had time to read a book. My mother worked from 8 a.m., 8 p.m. If somebody walks in at 7:55, she has to do their nails. She's not leaving until 9. When do you read a book? If you can afford a $30 hardback, when do you read it? So time - the idea of engaging in this product is expensive on the soul, on the body. And I'm really proud, actually, that they don't - 'cause some authors, their work comes home with them. And I can't even bring it home.

MOSLEY: 'Cause nobody cares.

VUONG: (Laughter) 'Cause nobody cared. Like, they're like, oh, book, cool. Put it - you know, put it aside. You know, fry, dye, lay it aside, you know.

MOSLEY: But they do care...

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...In some instance because you're caring for a lot of relatives. Like, you're financially...

VUONG: Yes.

MOSLEY: ...Caring for - how many is it?

VUONG: Nine people.

MOSLEY: Nine people.

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: Cousins, brothers, other...

VUONG: Yeah, extended family. And they're really proud. They - you know, my aunt, actually, she has a little album of all of my press cuttings, and she puts it under her desk at the nail salon. She whips it out. You know, she doesn't think anyone will believe her. It's all so interesting. She's like, I'm keeping all your press clippings 'cause people don't think - I don't think they're going to believe me if I say my nephew's Ocean Vuong, you know? I think also, like, you know, my aunt was the first one that told me - she says, I was talking about Oprah and my nephew is an Oprah pick at the salon, and all the people at the salon, they start Googling - all the other nail workers.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

VUONG: And then the first thing they said was, he's the first Vietnamese American Oprah pick.

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: And they're like - and they probably never read an Oprah pick, you know? But they were proud of that. So there is a kind of symbolic pride, but I don't force what I value onto them because I don't think it's fair.

MOSLEY: Growing up, though, did you feel a certain sense of class betrayal? I think that's something that you've mentioned about 'cause my sense is that you've always been who you are, that you loved to read once you discovered that as a medium. And how do you reconcile that to being yourself, but also being one of the litter?

VUONG: I don't read in front of my family.

MOSLEY: You still don't.

VUONG: I still don't.

MOSLEY: Why?

VUONG: Because there's a sense of, I think, ache when they see it. And I know even when they - oh, go do it. But there's a kind of - when I start to read in front of them, everything - everybody goes silent. The room deadens.

MOSLEY: When you're reading, like, aloud.

VUONG: Even, like, a magazine.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

VUONG: I'm just reading a magazine in the corner in front of my family. Everything goes silent. Because they're illiterate, it's - they have so much reverence for it, as if I'm performing some kind of liturgy or magic, right? And that saddens me because - and they're just like, everyone, shhh, Ocean's reading, as if I'm doing something like a wizard, right? And also, my mother, when I would read early on in my college life, she would say, I wish I could do that. She's like, just so you know, if I had a chance, I would read, too. And when she was dying - this is, like, the days still in the hospital. And I was asking her, you know, you say - and we knew it was terminal. And I just said, what do you need, Mom? Anything? What do you want to do? And we believe in reincarnation as Buddhists. And she said, in the next life, I want to be a professor like you.

MOSLEY: Ocean.

VUONG: (Crying) It's - because - and she don't know what that is, right? And you're told - you always thought that you look up to your mom, and I did. I did not know she was looking up to me the whole time. You know, I just thought, gosh, you know? But she was so proud to say that.

MOSLEY: Do you hold any, like, thoughts to the afterlife and what she can see and what - she's a part of this reality and this moment now?

VUONG: I don't know, but I feel her. And it's important for me to say this because so much of Asian American life is about making art despite or against our family's wishes. And I know that's true. But for me, I always had their blessing, even though they didn't know what I was doing. It was so strange to them, but they never said no to me. So when I walk into a place like this or when I walk into the classroom or onstage, my mother, my grandmother, my teachers, living and dead, my partner, my brother - I come in with their blessing, and they have vouched for me. So I do feel completely invincible in that sense. The body I can't speak to. That will degrade and fall apart. But mentally, spiritually, I feel invincible because that's the only thing I care about - their blessing.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is writer Ocean Vuong. Coming up, we'll hear Part 2 of our conversation in front of a live audience in Los Angeles. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRIAN ENO AND JOHN CALE SONG, "SPINNING AWAY")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I'm talking to author and poet Ocean Vuong about his new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness." Set in a fading Connecticut town, the book follows a suicidal young man whose life takes an unexpected turn when he becomes the caretaker for an elderly woman with dementia. It's loosely inspired by Vuong's own experiences growing up in a working-class immigrant family.

Vuong is the author of the bestselling novel "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" and the poetry collection "Time Is A Mother." In 2019, he was awarded a MacArthur genius grant for his groundbreaking contributions to literature. The rest of the conversation you're about to hear was recorded in front of an audience in Los Angeles. We pick up the conversation talking about the fictional protagonist from his latest book, who contemplates suicide, and Vuong's choice to write the character's decision to walk back from the ledge. If you're thinking of harming yourself or you know someone who is, help is available. You can call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. That's 988.

I just want to take in this crowd for a moment. Thank you all so much for coming on a weekday.

(LAUGHTER)

MOSLEY: Of course, we would all come for Ocean. Full house.

(APPLAUSE)

MOSLEY: I want to talk about something that's pretty dark. But you've lost people in your life to suicide. So have I. And this book, the main character, Hai, he wants to die. Or he believes he wants to die.

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: Until he is intercepted by this woman, who then becomes a very important person that he ends up caring for until her last days.

VUONG: Yeah. Yeah.

MOSLEY: And I wondered about you making that choice that he wanted to die, but then he had a chance to live. And I wanted to know, for you, that process and what it felt like to give him a life knowing that he wasn't successful in that endeavor.

VUONG: It was deeply important to me. I lost my uncle in 2012 to suicide. He was 28, I was 24, so he's really a brother. We were both born in Vietnam. We went through the refugee camps together. My first memory in my life ever is sitting on the curb in Hartford with him eating red sour belts. And it was in - we got it from a corner store, a candy store, probably the last one that was ever like this, where there was giant glass jars of candy, and the man took it out and weigh it.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

VUONG: Sounds like something from 60 years ago, you know?

MOSLEY: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: But that's my first memory on this Earth. And when someone stepped away from the ledge, everybody claps in the news segments, in the films and the stories. And I always wonder, are they clapping for the person? Or are they clapping because society has been restored? Because for that person, they have stepped away from the ledge into a corner. At the heart of it, suicide is still an act of hope. One does it in the hopes of ending immense suffering. So I've always wondered what Day 2 was like for someone who decides, God willing, to step back to life. And it was never a question I got to ask my uncle because he went through with it.

So to me, fiction is a fantastical second chance to launch questions that you never got to ask in life. And I knew that often, at the end of the story is where a life is saved, traditionally. And we all feel good and cathartic, and we go home. But I wanted to commit a life to be saved at the beginning. When you step away from that ledge, you still don't have hope. You still don't have the answers. Your life is still in shambles. How do you go on from there? And the culture tells us that we have to go out and find the reason to live. And in this scene, he lives because he forgets to die. You know, this woman's losing her laundry, and he's like, hey, your sheets.

MOSLEY: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: And he forgets. And I think, to me, that little gesture is actually how a lot of life works. You know, when my uncle - he had a note, and I'll just paraphrase it. There's a lot said there that I will not share, but there's one that I think is really useful to share. And you would think that we want the big reasons to step out of this world. But his reason was very, very small and maybe even ambivalent, where he said, I just had enough - I'm so sorry. I had enough, as if he was pushing back a second plate. It was this small gesture. And for me, coming from the working poor, I understood it. But I wonder if the larger culture who doesn't experience that know, because what he was saying is, I'm tired.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

VUONG: And so, similarly, I had this character also ambivalently choose. He doesn't plan it. He walks across the bridge, and he says, gosh, I think I'm tired enough to give this a try. And he comes back because he forgets the assignment because somebody is in more distress. And sometimes we come back to life not because we found a reason to live but because we realize we're more useful to somebody else than we ever were to ourselves. And that's a good enough reason.

MOSLEY: Ocean, death is part of the human condition that we don't want to look at it. We want to look away. But you choose to look at it. You choose through a death meditation. First off, explain for us what that is and why you think it's important to do for yourself.

VUONG: Particularly in the Tibetan tradition - I am a Buddhist practitioner of all traditions. I practice along the lines of Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen practice, but I embrace all. And death meditation is really important for the tantra tradition in Tibetan Buddhism. And there's even something called a sky burial wherein when someone dies, the corpse is brought to a mountain in Tibet, now Nepal, and they're wrapped. The body is wrapped in rags, and someone comes along to then butcher the body. And they would sprinkle on top the pieces with flour, and then the vultures come. And that's called a sky burial. It's the final offering of yourself back to the world. It's the last gesture of generosity, bringing - giving the body back to nature, and also forgetting this whole thing was always an illusion, right? This whole thing will decay. And so it's both for the living, but it's also the wish of the dead. And that sounds very morbid, maybe even horrific. But in the Buddhist tradition, thinking and meditating on death brings the propulsion of life forward because there's nothing.

And what I do, usually, I sit and I do my breathing, and I start to just think about the death that I've experienced in my life with my loved ones and also my own death, where I will go, where this body will go. And so the death meditation, when you're having a bad day, when you're getting a bad email from work, the arguments, the petty things we argue with our loved ones - you do the death meditation. You say, oh, that's the only truth, and then all those petty things become so small. I stood up from that death meditation, and I just said, gosh, why was I ever upset in the first place, right? How could I have - lose track of myself? I have good days and bad days with it. There are times I sit up, and I say, that email is so messed up.

MOSLEY: Right? OK?

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: I'm like, I need to - I'm sitting there thinking about a coffin. And I'm like - and my mind is like, I need to write the essay email...

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: ...That's 5,000 words, that denies all rebuttals.

MOSLEY: (Laughter) Right.

VUONG: And that needs to put an end to it. This email is going to be the lid on the coffin.

MOSLEY: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: Right. So you try your best, but - you know, but that's my North Star, you know, to kind of move towards that.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer and poet Ocean Vuong. We're talking about his latest novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE GROUP'S "IOWA TAKEN")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking to author Ocean Vuong about his new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness," which is set in a small Connecticut town, where a suicidal young man's life is unexpectedly rerouted when he becomes the caretaker to an elderly woman with dementia. The conversation was in front of a sold-out audience at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles.

This is the first book that you've written since your mother passed, and I'm just curious. Do you feel like we owe anything to those that stay with us, that are such a deep part of who we are? Do you think that we owe them anything here as part of the living?

VUONG: I think I'm going to think about that question for the rest of my life.

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: It's interesting because my mother's language is now inside me after she left. She left me her thinking, and I find myself thinking the way she did. And even times when I disagree with her and - when she was alive, now I think like her. I'm judging like her, you know (laughter)? I'm like - you know, I look at the world sometimes - I'm looking at things and I say, gosh, that's what my mom thinks, and now I think that. And I think they're very porous when they go. They actually leave so much of themselves behind.

And for me, the utmost honor that I don't think I can even escape or choose to turn away from is to do this work with immense care and gratitude. I get to try. That's my profession. How many people do we know - you and I growing up, working poor - get to try at no cost? When my mother gets that nail wrong, she needs to stay the extra 40 minutes at no extra pay. My stepdad spent 25 years making a screw that goes into gas pumps. If he makes it wrong, that's docking off his pay. The people who brought us here, their second chances were so expensive that they couldn't afford it. And I get to sit here over a page and try and fail and try again. And so, to me, there is no draft that is too much.

And I think for me, when I sit down to write or when I teach, I think, gosh, I need to honor them by enjoying the work I get to do, even when it's hard. Because we love to complain about work in this country, and it's - this country is work. This book is all about labor, and we're justified in that. To me, nothing's ever too sacred to say that even at its worst, I get to work, and not only get to work. I get to work on my own terms.

MOSLEY: The thing I want to ask you is that you have also said, though, that writing is not a forever thing for you. You actually have a limit on the amount of books that you plan to publish. Is it something like eight or something like that?

VUONG: Yeah, yeah.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Why?

VUONG: It's eight after the Eightfold Path in Buddhism, which is the path the Buddha laid out for liberation from suffering in this realm. So it's a number that is auspicious to me. When I was a very young writer in my - I think 21, 22 - I came home one day, and I was listening to an NPR piece. Come home from school, and it was my hero on NPR. It was Annie Dillard.

MOSLEY: Ah.

VUONG: And immediately, I said, uh-oh, she's got a new book out. Let's go. Let's go, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: Take my money.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: And my ears perked up. And it was, I think, one of the most memorable early radio moments because immediately she says, I'm here to tell you that I'm retiring. And the interviewer was kind of taken aback. And in a very delicate way, the interviewer was basically saying, well, what's wrong with you?

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: Are you losing your mind, right? Are you ill? And Dillard said, no. I woke up one morning, went to my desk and realized I've done everything I set out to do as a writer, and the writer label does not define me. And I have more life to live, but I am done because I did my work on my terms. And I tell you, like anybody else, I was told the writer's worth is their corpus, is what they can keep achieving and filling the world with endlessly. And I was so amazed by that. I thought, gosh, that's what I want. I want that feeling - to be able to write with such care and such sincerity, 'cause Dillard is a sincere writer, right? She's - when you read her work, you know you are looking over her shoulder as she digs for something she doesn't understand. And I said, I want to be able to wake up one day and look at what I've done and know that I've done it with such care that I can stop well. To hear someone, my hero, say, I'm trying to end well, and I did.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, we're listening to my conversation with writer Ocean Vuong about his latest novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TOMMASO-RAVA QUARTET'S "L'AVVENTURA")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I am talking to author and poet Ocean Vuong about his new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness." Loosely inspired by Vuong's own experiences growing up in a working-class immigrant family in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the novel explores themes of chosen family, survival and the quiet resilience of everyday life.

I've heard you say that you've been really thinking about trying to get to the center of yourself and understand who you really are because we all, to a certain extent, perform. Maybe it's code-switching. I love how - I think you said, we not only perform in our work. Of course, we have our work selves and our home selves, but we even have the person we perform in front of our lovers, in front of our family members. But the person you are when you're by yourself and you're alone, I want to know more about that and where you are with that and how you've come to it.

VUONG: Well, one of my favorite poets is Reginald Shepherd. He passed away in 2008. He's a brilliant poet. He wrote this beautiful book on Black poetics called "Orpheus In The Bronx." If there's one book you read this year, please read Reginald Shepherd's "Orpheus In The Bronx." He grew up with welfare. His mother passed away, grew up in the Bronx, went to Brown, went to Iowa, and he made the word take him wherever he wanted to go, so a huge hero of mine. Reginald said something really brilliant in "Orpheus In The Bronx," where he says, identity is not finite. It is organic and growing.

He was talking specifically about Blackness, but you can match it and map it onto anything else. He said, why do we believe Blackness is over, that I have to then translate this rock into the culture that makes it understandable for whiteness? What if, instead, it's this on-growing (ph), nebulous spore that's constantly moving? At any given day, I don't know what Blackness is, but I'm moving towards it as it's moving through me. And it just blew my mind. I said, that's it. I don't know what is at the center of me. There are the labels that the culture gives - queer Asian American working-class, OK. But those labels also erase us as much as they name us.

The first thing colonizers do is they categorize things. Categorization becomes a method, the first, the predecessor for subjugation. And so I like this idea that the true me is unknown even to me, and the work becomes like a photograph. There's a fountain in us, and it's always moving, and the work just captures it in time. Maybe it's something about being Asian American, being queer, maybe there's something else, but there is a kind of desire to not be captured. Why that is, I don't know, but I think that I don't really want to be known. I don't want to be transparent. So the books become bait, in a way, so that I can move elsewhere. It's an interesting...

MOSLEY: Because you sprinkle bits of yourself through all of these books.

VUONG: Yeah. I see it as a reincarnation, as a Buddhist. My books are not temporal sequences, but they are reincarnations of myself. And that's kind of a faux pas in Western values. You're supposed to reinvent yourself entirely. But where is that true? You and I are here because of the ancestors, the DNA, the memory, the features of everyone who made us. And I don't see anything different in a book. But I don't approach any identity, least of all Asian American identity, as something I know. I approach it as something I'm discovering.

MOSLEY: You've actually had students come to you, maybe white, young men who say, I want to write in a way that doesn't perpetuate the legacy of the past.

VUONG: Yes.

MOSLEY: And they're coming to you asking you for guidance and direction. And you tell them, there is no blueprint for this. What you want to do, you're actually going to be the one to do it.

VUONG: Yes. I just wrapped up my 11th year of teaching, and it's the honor of my life to be a teacher. I see myself more as a teacher than a writer. To me, the books are more like performances. They're singular things. I've never signed a multibook contract. It's one contract per book. You know, my family would prefer...

(LAUGHTER)

MOSLEY: Yeah. I mean, that's such a - that is such a brave choice...

VUONG: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Knowing that your family - because there is money there.

VUONG: Yeah. Tell that to my brother when he...

MOSLEY: Right.

VUONG: ...Wants some new Yeezys or whatever you call them, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: You get more money with more books, but I'm not in the business of selling ghosts. And so, one book at a time, and - so what I realize, you know, when we talk about the white gays or white audience, I've learned through my experience - I've been doing this for 15 years now - that what we really mean is the elitist gatekeepers, institutions that believe in their power occupied by white folks. But we have to also dismantle whiteness down to its granular othernesses in the same way we have to dismantle the stereotypes on people of color. The project is two pronged. And as a teacher, I pride myself on educating every student in my class. That is my job. It is sacred to me. And I found this new generation of white students coming to me and say Professor, are we are there. We are on the front lines. We are sick of this. How do I write so that my sentence holds all bodies with respect because I can't get it from Faulkner. I can't get her from Hemingway. And the office hour is like a confessional booth, you know? It gets real.

(LAUGHTER)

VUONG: We get real. And I said, you're correct. The Mount Rushmore that you were given have failed you in this regard. So you will now have to do what so many writers of color have done. You now have to be the first. But you're luckier. You are still richer for having come so late because Morrison did not have a Toni Morrison when she was writing "Beloved," but you do.

MOSLEY: This has been such a pleasure. We could listen to you all night.

VUONG: Likewise.

MOSLEY: But thank you. Thank you.

VUONG: Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

MOSLEY: Ocean Vuong is the author of the new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness."

If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our conversation with Harvard law professor Noah Feldman about the face off between Harvard and the Trump administration, or with actor Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars," check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and to get our producers recommendations on what to watch, read and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson (ph). Thea Chaloner directed today's show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "THE FALCON WILL FLY AGAIN")

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