ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Today, the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong sits among an elite sliver of celebrated U.S. writers. His debut novel, "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," won a bunch of awards in 2019. He got a MacArthur Fellowship, known as a genius grant. He's on faculty at NYU. All of that is very different from the environment where he grew up, raised by working-class Vietnamese immigrants in Hartford, Connecticut, a place a lot like the postindustrial town of East Gladness, where his latest novel is set. Here's how Ocean Vuong describes it early in his new book, "The Emperor Of Gladness."
OCEAN VUONG: (Reading) It's a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers' 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.
SHAPIRO: The novel centers on an unlikely friendship between a 19-year-old college dropout named Hai and an 82-year-old with dementia named Grazina. Ocean Vuong told me the two have something important in common.
VUONG: Well, I think in many ways, we throw around the phrase quintessential America, and we can say it's the white picket fence; it's the American dream. But what I actually thought looking at these two people was that they both come from war - Grazino flees Stalin in World War II, Hai and his family fled the war in Vietnam. And there's nothing more quintessentially American than to have two strangers who survived two wars, 30 years apart, meet and actually share this sort of shared bond of survival.
And to me, I want to reframe America as not just this place of opportunity but a place where things can be salvaged through debris. Both Hai and Grazina are debris ejected from two horrifying geopolitical ruptures, but they are not trash. They are not garbage. They are debris that has picked themselves up and created a new life.
SHAPIRO: The last page of this book says, in memory of Grazina J. Verselis, 1925 to 2014. And reading that suddenly through the rest of the novel into a different kind of context for me. I was dying to know, who is she? Who is this other Grazina?
VUONG: She was an incredible woman who I managed to live with as I was going through college. I dropped out of Pace University, and I lost my housing. And when I signed up to study at Brooklyn College, I got in, but I didn't have housing. Eventually, a friend of mine basically said, my grandmother is living alone, and if you go and live with her and just take care of her, you have a room. And I didn't know what I was getting into. I was, you know, 19. I thought taking care of just meant being there. But boy, you know, right away, I learned words like dementia, words like Aricept, you know?
SHAPIRO: That's a word I don't know.
VUONG: (Laughter) Yeah. It's a medication for dementia. And I realized in this country, both the young and the very old have been pushed on the margins. The young have been deemed inadequate. They don't have the means or the assets to contribute properly to American progress. And the old have been deemed defunct. They are outside of their working productive years.
And the common ground between the 40, 50 years between us was that we were both completely isolated, and the immense loneliness of the very young and the very old was actually a binding, beautiful moment for us. And I would sit there watching "The Price Is Right" with her as if I was sitting with my grandmother, and it really changed what I thought human interactions and human potential could be because it really wasn't about our racial differences or our cultural ones. It was about necessity. I found out that living with her, I was more useful to her than I was ever to myself. (Crying) And it changed how I considered my role as an artist...
SHAPIRO: Wow.
VUONG: ...As a person, and it was really important.
SHAPIRO: Do you want to take a moment?
VUONG: Yeah. Thank you so much.
SHAPIRO: Yeah, of course.
VUONG: Oh, gosh.
SHAPIRO: Take your time. Do you want a drink of water?
VUONG: Yeah. Thank you so much.
SHAPIRO: OK, sure. Yeah.
The first time these two characters meet, Hai tells Grazina, my dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable things. Is that also your dream? Is that what this novel is?
VUONG: Yes, absolutely. Growing up in Hartford, my family and I came from Vietnam. We didn't have a lot of English, and we were living in a one-bedroom apartment on government assistance sponsored by The Salvation Army, bless their hearts. And we were invited into the Baptist Church, and that's where I first encountered the myth of Noah's Ark.
And I thought it was real. As a 7-, 8-year-old, I said, my goodness. What a life, to build something and put everything into it that would survive an apocalypse. What would I put? And to me, it's the beautiful things and the ugly things that will then teach us how to be and how to learn from each other.
SHAPIRO: In this book, there are so many moments where ugly things are happening and they are described in a beautiful way, whether it is a pig slaughterhouse or a character who is in recovery relapses and you write, he was warm as a blood cell being swept through the vein of a fallen angel, finally good. Is there a kind of - I don't know - power or even radicalism in bringing beauty to ugliness, to the unlovable things, to scenes even of horror?
VUONG: I think so. And in this sense, I have to credit the women who raised me. I was raised by my grandmother and my mother, my aunts, all of whom were illiterate, but they were not without the capacity for wonder. And I think when you have so little to give your children as they did as refugees, they gave me the capacity to understand wonder. There is an epistemology to understanding and learning how to be befuddled and at awe of the world at once.
So to me, that became really technique and craft. The challenge is, can you look at the world long enough to worship the potential of it? And I think language is really interesting because how you describe something reveals who you are. Description is DNA. And so the more we describe the world, the more we actually share our values, our perspectives.
And I think there is a kind of Buddhist ethos to what I believe in, in my description, is that nothing is irredeemable. Even the ugly, the worse of us have potential to be salvaged, and to me, the sentence perhaps is the most capacious medium for that effort.
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SHAPIRO: That's Ocean Vuong. His new novel is "The Emperor Of Gladness." Tomorrow, what he learned from working in fast food and how that shaped his characters. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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