Pratique du Shadowing: Author Ocean Vuong on his new book The Emperor of Gladness | 7.30 - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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Ocean Vuong, welcome to 7.30.

Oh, thank you so much.

Glad to be here.

And we're here to talk about your new book,

Emperor of Gladness, but also to talk about you as a writer.

Your family were Vietnamese refugees living amongst the working poor in Connecticut.

They didn't read or write,

but they were great storytellers.

Is that where your great gift for writing and your impulse to write comes from?

Oh, thank you for that.

I would say yes.

I mean, I was the first to read and write in my family,

but I was not the first poet.

They were storytellers long before I came along.

And I think in retrospect,

what I got sitting in those rooms in the nail salon

and after they came home from work was a masterclass in storytelling.

They knew when to accelerate, decelerate.

Now I know how to call those things as scene setting, dialogue, exposition.

But they gave me that.

They learned it on the fly.

And they self-mythologized because I think they realized that they were a group of women who raised all sons.

Four women gave birth to six sons.

It was almost Shakespearean in the contrast.

they were in a country where they had very little power,

and because they didn't have access to English,

the power was degrading from them day to day,

and yet their sons were acquiring English at an exorbitant rate.

And so to reconfigure the family dynamics,

they mythologized themselves, and they told stories,

and I noticed every single time they told it,

it would shift a little bit, little details would change.

And I said, wait a minute,

are we in the world of fiction or non-fiction or myth

or epic poems where are we I guess it doesn't matter they were the first hybrid practitioners as far as my experience.

Despite that skill of theirs

that you're describing of course you went on to become a highly accomplished writer with with awards

and scholarships and positions at great universities did you ever try

and disguise your accomplishment as a writer from your mother in particular because she didn't read?

Well, yes and no. You know,

I think a lot of the accomplishments were just words to them.

They didn't see it.

I mean, you know, things that I valued in my career,

they just thought was just interesting facts.

But there was a lot of shame,

I think, in moving forward.

I think my mother was at once deeply proud of me,

but also deeply reluctant.

And there was a sense of regret that my son is doing what I couldn't do,

not because I didn't have the ability,

but I never had the opportunity.

And she would always joke and say,

gosh, if I spoke English,

I would be speaking to presidents, not you fool.

That's how she would talk to us kids.

And I believe her.

I think that would be true.

And so one day something really poignant happened where I realized I came home to visit

and I started to pick up a book and read.

And there was a pallor that came over her face and she looked at me reading a book.

It's a simple little book,

part of my school assignment.

And there was this kind of longing,

the way people look at,

you know, vistas or mountains or something, you know.

And I thought, gosh, I'm never going to read in front of her again,

because it was this kind of action that she had no access to.

And from then on, I never picked up a book in front of my mother again.

And we found a way that way until she passed.

But I couldn't bear to see my mother look at me with that kind of impossible yearning.

I think this is the first book you've written since she passed away.

How different is that without her,

if not the direct audience,

the part of the reason for writing and achieving not being there?

oh it's it's unbearable you know i think every writer tells himself i write for myself

or one day i'll write for myself and it will be glorious

and i felt that way too i thought gosh maybe

when i'm much older you know 50

or 60 i'll finally write for myself i wonder what i would do

when i get that opportunity and at 36 i got

that opportunity and it felt incredibly vacant and full of grief and guilt.

You know, here I am.

I told myself I was going to be a professor for her to take care of my family.

You know, I tried to shift away from that quintessential immigrant narrative.

I won't be a doctor.

I won't be a businessman to do right in society and pull ourselves from poverty.

I'll be a poet instead.

And ironically, I ended up doing the same thing, but with words.

I ended up, you know,

trying to do the best I can to be a professor,

to earn a living and take care of my family and my mother.

And then now she's gone.

And so I think for me,

this thing that I was waiting for,

this golden opportunity, once it came,

I realized I never really wanted it.

I think I much prefer to be writing for and beside her.

But we all have to move towards this new vista eventually and here I am.

We don't choose it, but I got a chance to do it with this book.

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You said you wanted to write a book about people who are pushed to the fringes of society,

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but you didn't want the plot to improve their lives.

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Why is that?

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Well, I think plot systems traditionally almost have a tyrannical impulse.

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It's almost like, it functions very much like corporate dogma.

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Either you're useful to us or you're out.

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We kind of cut the fat, right?

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If you don't have a function,

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then you must be ejected.

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You are no longer part of the project.

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And I felt like, is life that way?

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Or is that, are there other interesting ways to have people exist without moving into the absolute tyranny of plot?

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And that's not to say that that's the only plot there is.

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I think plot also includes pattern.

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It can include detours, meanderings.

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And for me, resisting that allowed me to preserve the characters on their own terms.

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I won't look at a character and say,

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you need to just fit into this grand machine or you're going to be spat out.

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To me, the machine has to work alongside the people.

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And it was difficult to find a way through that.

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But I think for me,

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it was really important to allow characters to exist on their

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own terms without turning them into a function for a sum total of something else.

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Now, you spent time working in a fast food restaurant which is sort of the basis for the,

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I'm assuming, basis for the fast food restaurant in this book.

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What does that world where you worked,

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what does that tell us about what and how America is?

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Oh, the fast food restaurant is a kind of perfect parable.

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And in many ways, this novel is a parable.

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It's an epic parable about America itself because fast food,

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if nothing else, is about mirages.

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It's about the fantastical.

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It's the promise of absolute goodness and delivered through deception.

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Nothing is really cooked.

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Nothing is really made.

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It's all reheated.

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And there's this kind of sanguine joy that is performed.

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Meanwhile, the employees are often underpaid,

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exhausted, stuck, overtaxed, and outmatched.

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And yet, you know, it's also the fuel of this country.

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So many of us, of all,

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you know, if you're ever stuck in an airport,

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no matter who you are,

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no matter how much your salary is,

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you might be meandering eventually over to the McDonald's.

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And so there's at once a brutal reality that labor in this country often leads us to very little prosperity,

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but also the kind of utopic promise that no matter who you are,

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you can still get a Big Mac and it will still taste the same.

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You'll get the same experience.

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The King of Spain could have the same experience as the Joe Schmo down the street,

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because everything has been sort of made into democratic, consumerist monolith.

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And that contrast of both the dark and the strange possibility and kinship was something that is deeply rooted,

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I think, in the American ethos, as I understood it.

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The characters in this novel,

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you know, they are trapped in low-wage jobs.

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Life is hard.

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But they find community.

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What is it about that community that made you want to write about it?

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I witnessed just incredible moments of kindness,

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and I don't want to romanticize wage workers.

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I'm not here to say they're any more angelic or virtuous than anybody else.

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I don't think labor or suffering makes one virtuous.

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But what I realized was that why they were so,

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my colleagues were so generous with their kindness was that they knew that when someone was down and out,

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that they were just one day away,

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one check away from being exactly where those people are.

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And so it's the proximity to despair that made generosity and kindness so open and so willing.

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We expended it without thinking about the cost.

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And I think that was really admirable to me.

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As a young person, I think it was a foundational experience in my life

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that it's not about counting how much you lose or gain through these actions.

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It's that actually when you help your community, you benefit.

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You come out better because of it.

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Now, there's also a lot of violence in these people's lives.

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You said, I've never seen anyone commit violence and feel joy after.

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What is the role of violence in this community and in people's lives?

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Well, it becomes a microcosm of American life.

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I think America is a violent country.

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It has a violent history.

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I think that's why it's very difficult for Americans in general,

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both living and in the archive,

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to truly look in the past.

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Because you have to look at slavery,

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Native American genocide, land theft, natural disaster.

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the proliferation of corporations over nature in the natural world and the destruction therein.

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And so it's really hard to look at ourselves.

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And I think that's why we prefer mirages.

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We prefer, you know, slogans like, make America great again.

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And when you ask, where is that again?

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You'll never get a year, right?

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So we perform the nostalgia because it's so hallucinatory,

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But the violence is embedded into the fabric.

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And I don't, I'm not here to judge it.

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It's there.

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It's the fact of who we are.

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I'm more interested in saying, now what?

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What is the aftermath of violence?

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You know, luckily, not all of us are vanquished in violent acts.

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We do survive.

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The question that I'm interested as a writer is how do we survive?

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In what way?

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And is there still a method of dignity left in the aftermath of the long systems of American violence

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that we still feel today?

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There is a great beauty in the way that you don't judge,

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but you pose very big questions there.

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At the same time as a writer,

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you're working in a period when people are reading less,

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where perhaps books are less valued than they were.

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What makes you hopeful that your writing can have a positive impact on people's lives?

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I think history moves in cycles,

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for better and for worse.

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And regardless of what happens or what the medium of reading is,

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maybe in 10 years, we will be beaming novels into each other's heads instantly.

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And I would be the first to be okay with that.

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I'm a slow reader myself.

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If I could receive a Moby Dick in a few seconds,

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I'll be the first to sign up.

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But at the end of the day,

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no matter what happens, language is the ultimate technology.

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We as a society, as a people,

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can have the most powerful weapons,

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the greatest medicine, the highest technology.

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But whether we live or die to defend those things or to preserve them or value them depends on language.

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All wars begin with language.

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Gunfire, violence, those are incidents.

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War requires sustained, focused violence upon a group of people that,

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through violence, we have deemed worthy of death.

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So to me, those large systems begin with books, speeches, manifestos, language.

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So we will never break away from the tussle of language,

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regardless of the medium.

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And I think the novel is one of the most capacious ways to think through it without judgment.

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There's plenty of judgment in the world,

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news reports, textbooks, judgments are everywhere.

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We judge ourselves.

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But the novel allows this moment of world building,

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action, objective performance without absolute judgment.

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And I think I'm personally much better thinker because of that.

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You know, listening to you talk,

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it's like having a giant bath in language.

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You use language in your books,

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in your poems, and when you speak with such fine clarity and such beauty.

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Do you remember when you realized you had this ability to put words together to make beautiful things?

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I think it was when I became a teacher.

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I had the great luck of being a professor at a very young age,

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relatively, 26 years old.

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Why they let me in a university at 26, I don't know.

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You'll have to ask the dean.

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I can't speak to that,

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but they let me in.

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And I think what happens is that when you step into a classroom,

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even before a single soul enters it,

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teacher, student, an empty classroom itself is a laboratory of care.

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It is filled with optimism.

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It is filled with hope and possibility.

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So when you walk into that,

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you walk into that with care.

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And language and writing is such a feeble and delicate medium.

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One comma, off place, and everything falls apart.

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You have the wrong clause,

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and the sentence just sags and falls through.

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So it becomes mimetic of the work of the civic duty of pedagogy and teaching,

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is that you have to do something with care and you're using language with care and intention and deliberateness.

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And so I think that vocation to me is more clearer to me than even the work of writing.

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The writing, it might be a byproduct of the teaching because that vocation centres care,

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delicacy and a kind of determination with hope that renews me every season.

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I've heard people say about your writing

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that it appeals in particular to young people because you speak to them so directly about feelings.

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So how important do you think it is as a writer to speak to young people about those things?

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Oh, thank you for that question.

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I think this is my 11th year as a professor.

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And what I've noticed, you know,

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in a very unsettling way is that our students,

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at least in America, I can't speak for other places,

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they are more and more self-conscious of trying.

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There's a kind of surveillance culture around social media.

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And they would say, I want to be a poet.

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I want to be a good writer.

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But it's a bit cringe.

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Right? this cringe culture that I don't want to be perceived as trying and having an effortful attempt at my dreams.

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And as a teacher, that's a horrifying sort of report from the field.

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And so I think they are absolutely scared of judgment.

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And so in fact, they perform cynicism because cynicism can be misread as it often is as intelligence.

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You know, you're disaffected, You're too cool.

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You've seen it all.

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And so they pull back.

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But in fact, they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort.

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They often do it privately.

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They don't want to admit to each other that they're actually trying really hard to do what they want to do.

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But amongst their peers, I think sincerity is something we deeply hunger for, particularly young people.

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but we are embarrassed when sincerity is in the room.

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And the classroom is a wonderful place to eradicate that,

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but it's up to the teacher because you do have some sort of authority.

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You do have to set the tone.

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And if you set the tone for your students and you welcome them,

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that you won't judge them,

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that they can be sincere and earnest without being condemned or ridiculed for it,

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that they can try their best and it won't be cringy to do so,

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then you truly liberate them towards their best selves.

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You've given us so much through the beauty of your writing,

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but you're also giving us the freedom to be sincere again.

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Ocean Vuong, it's a real pleasure for me and for our audience,

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I know, to talk to you.

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Thank you very much indeed.

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Thank you, Sarah.

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It's a deep honour.

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Pratique du Shadowing: Author Ocean Vuong on his new book The Emperor of Gladness | 7.30 - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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Pratique du Shadowing: Author Ocean Vuong on his new book The Emperor of Gladness | 7.30 - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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