With new novel, Ocean Vuong says he wants to reframe America as a place of salvage

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

Ocean Vuong's debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous placed him in an elite club of American writers. He teaches at NYU and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other honors. But before all this, the author was raised by working-class Vietnamese immigrant parents in Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong's new novel The Emperor of Gladness takes place in a similar environment and centers on an unlikely friendship between a 19 year-old college dropout named Hai and an 82-year-old with dementia named Grazina. In today's episode, Vuong joins NPR's Ari Shapiro for a conversation about reframing our view of the United States and the American dream, describing ugly things in a beautiful way, and Vuong's experience working in close quarters at a fast food restaurant.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's something patriotic about today's
0:08.9	interview. It's with the writer Ocean Vuong, who's got a new novel titled The Emperor of Gladness.
0:14.8	It's about a 19-year-old boy who befriends an elderly woman with dementia, something that happened to
0:20.0	Wong himself.
0:25.8	And it's not as if this book is, you know, rah, raw American jingoism. It's not that kind of patriotism. But instead, in this interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro, Vuong hits on the almost
0:31.8	ineffable essence that binds us all as Americans. That's ahead.
0:38.0	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
0:42.8	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods.
0:49.4	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events
0:54.8	matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:02.7	Today, the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong sits among an elite sliver of celebrated U.S. writers.
1:09.7	His debut novel on Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous won a bunch of
1:13.1	awards in 2019. He got a MacArthur Fellowship, known as a Genius Grant. He's on faculty at NYU.
1:19.8	All of that is very different from the environment where he grew up, raised by working-class
1:25.1	Vietnamese immigrants in Hartford, Connecticut, a place a lot like the
1:30.0	post-industrial town of East Gladness, where his latest novel is set. Here's how Ocean Vuong
1:36.1	describes it early in his new book, The Emperor of Gladness. It's a town where high school kids,
1:43.0	having nowhere to go on Friday nights,
1:45.5	park their stepfather's trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot,
1:50.2	drinking Smyranoff out of Poland's spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Little Wayne
1:55.0	until they looked down one night to find a baby in their arms
1:58.8	and realize they're 30-something and the Walmart hasn't changed,
	...

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