Lemonada

Lemonada

This is Talk Easy. I'm San Francisco. Welcome to the show.

Today, writer and professor, Ocean Vong.

Vong first joined us around the publication of his debut novel On Earth,

We're Briefly Gorgeous.

The book, which was an immediate bestseller, was an excavation of his family's history in Vietnam, which is where

Bong was born and raised until the family immigrated to America when he was just two years old.

And it was here, stateside, in Connecticut, that Bong came of age in a one-bedroom apartment

with seven relatives, a mother who worked long hours at the local nail salon, and a father

who eventually left one day and never came back. By the time Ocean was a teenager, he was the first

in his family to read and write proficiently. But that's only part of how he became a novelist

and poet. The other part is the basis of his latest book,

The Emperor of Gladness, a personal history of his years as a wayward teen, bouncing back and

forth between East Hartford and New York City, dipping in and out of sobriety. In the opening pages,

we find our protagonist, named High High on the edge of a bridge

ready to jump, that is, until he's flagged down by Grisina, an elderly Lithuanian immigrant,

who happens to see him from her front yard. In a moment of generosity from her and a moment of

desperation for him, Hye moves in and effectively becomes her live-in nurse,

while also balancing a job at a local restaurant called Home Market,

which has all the features of a Boston market.

As you'll hear, the parallels between Ocean's lived experiences

...