Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco so. Welcome to the show. Today I'm joined by writer Ocean Waughan. Two years ago Ocean

published his book on Earth were briefly gorgeous. It's now being released on paperback through Penguin books.

Written as a letter from a Vietnamese American to his illiterate mother, Ocean describes

the piece as an autobiographical novel, which is to say, a book born out of family and fiction, history, and imagination

the protagonist named Little Dog reveals through letters a family history rooted in Vietnam.

Ocean himself was born in Saigon and moved to the United States at the age of two.

His mother was the daughter of an American soldier who fell in love with the Vietnamese girl during the war.

In the book, Ocean writes,

Sometimes I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter,

but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam.

As you can see, the line between autobiography and fiction is blurred.

But it's also, I think, not entirely important to make these distinctions.

What's real is that Ocean grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, where, as he writes, he grew up reckoning with the colonial

past, someone who thought of America as a policy of violence, a pattern of death.

And so in this talk, we try to wrestle with all that this book encompasses,

the cage of white male privilege, the horrific violence of this past year, the racial reckoning happening

around the world.

As some of you may know, Ocean speaks as he writes. A single sentence often contains three or four ideas, all of which

worthy of discussion, and yet, along with the thoughtfulness you may expect, what you're about to hear is someone

truly processing this moment in American life.

Processing our collective uncertainty and hopefulness.

Processing the pain of March 16th in Atlanta.

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