Shadowing Practice: Ocean Vuong: The NEW Waterstones Interview - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Ocean, it's great to see you again.
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Ocean, it's great to see you again.
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Good to see you again, Will.
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Always a pleasure.
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Thank you for giving me some time to talk to you about your new novel,
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The Emperor of Gladness.
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I had that experience, which I think your readers will be very used to,
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which is when you start a book of yours,
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immediately there's this fantastic language that does an amazing job of describing a place,
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a time, and a person often.
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And it's very distinctive at the beginning when you're setting scenes.
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It seems that you have an almost hyper-realistic detail to your writing.
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Can you tell me a little bit about that?
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Do you make a real effort in those sort of scene setting bits
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and then moving on with the rest of the book?
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I think they're all modes.
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This book, I was deeply interested in allowing the town,
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East Gladness, to be its own character.
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And I think you earn your moves for me.
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And as a debut novelist,
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I couldn't have really done that.
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I think, you know, you want to get on with the story.
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But I felt like I wanted to show that a book can be built patiently,
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that a place can come through,
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and that specificity becomes a universal symbol because a reader will always map themselves.
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When you say, even when I say railroad tracks,
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right, a reader in Manchester will see a different railroad tracks than I do in Massachusetts or another one in South Africa.
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And so it's impossible because as writers,
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we're working with a medium that is not complete even once the book is finished.
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Because this is just text.
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It is only activated in the reader's mind once they read it.
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And no other art is like this, right? music,
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film, sculpture, all of it is finished.
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You can have endless interpretations of those things,
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but it doesn't need activation in the way text does.
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And so that mode of activation,
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to me, is a sacred space.
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I don't mind being romantic about it because it takes a lot for someone to say,
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I will commit my time and body and imagination to this place.
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Because the text signals ideas and images,
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which is a displacement of the reader.
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So when you're reading a book,
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you're saying, I'm going to forego my life for this life.
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And I think setting the tone thoroughly is an act of care.
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And I've never been able to write a good sentence carelessly,
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as much as I like to.
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I think it was Sontag who says,
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there's no luck in writing.
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And I think it's interesting because we have a lot of child prodigies in music and sculpture and paint,
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but no prodigies, no true prodigies in literature.
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Because literature, you can write a good sentence,
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you can know language, but then you have to be able to empathize.
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You have to talk to hundreds of people,
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know sorrow, know how to pull back from sorrow, balance it out.
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And unfortunately or fortunately, it takes thorough,
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thorough observation
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and living with a kind of faith even in how human beings interact with each other to write with care and purpose.
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And that's what I, the first book gave me the privilege of writing even more carefully in the second book.
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As you mentioned, the gladness of the title is a place,
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it's a location, in a post-industrial town in Connecticut.
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And we meet first a 19-year-old boy called Hai,
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who is ready to throw themselves off a bridge into the river to commit suicide.
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Could you tell us a little bit about Hai,
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and I suppose what has brought him up to the point where we meet him?
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I think like a lot of youth in America,
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this book takes place in the Obama era.
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We were told that the next age of hope would come.
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And there was a political movement that would speak for our voices that will concern the working class.
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And within months, that administration bailed out corporations that were quote unquote too big to fail.
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And I saw my peers absolutely bereft of purpose and life.
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I've, you know, suicide has touched my own life with my friends and my family.
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And for the Asian American community,
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it's a major blight on the youth.
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We have suicide rates that,
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you know, some of the highest among youth in America.
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And it's a dramatic moment that often novels lead to.
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And for me, I wanted to start there and to say,
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well, if you're starting at the brink,
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what would happen if you pull back?
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What is life in the aftermath of that decision?
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And I think I sympathize greatly with that character.
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I think that character is also a summation of an era,
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the post 9-11 era that I'm obsessed with and I write about often.
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the hopelessness of those times where there was no,
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you get a job working in fast food or you go to college,
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you get a degree, and there's still no hope.
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You get a decent wage job and you still can't pay your bills.
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And so I wanted to put all of that social
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and economic pressure onto one symbolic character and then let him meet an older woman,
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Grigina, 82 years old.
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The beautiful thing I found about the very young and the very old is that they're both closest to nothing.
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And they're both on the outskirts of society.
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This book takes place on the outskirts of a city.
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And they're both, one is,
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you know, Hai is deemed inadequate because he's too young.
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He doesn't have qualifications, experience.
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Grazina is deemed defunct by society.
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She no longer contributes productively.
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And so commerce have evacuated these two characters from the center.
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But in fact, it's that evacuation that allows them to see each other because there's nothing for them to do.
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And I insist that we kind of replace human connection with progress.
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How many times have we forsaken time spent with our loved ones to get a better job,
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to work the extra hours, to improve our lives.
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It's a very human gesture.
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But these people can't even do that.
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They don't even have that possibility.
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So in a way, all they have is each other.
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And I actually think the young and the old have a lot in common
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because there's a kind of deep isolation and loneliness that comes from being pushed out of the center of my society.
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have a very interesting bond,
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Hai and Grzina, as you say.
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She hails from Lithuania and she is losing her mind to dementia and is being plagued by these dreams,
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nightmares that come back from from wartime.
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And Hai becomes effectively her carer.
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So that there is this thing that's bonding them together.
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But it's a complex relationship because there are elements of exploitation there in a way
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because high is somebody who is not perfect and can see that there's an opportunity there.
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That's quite a complicated relationship to write.
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So I'm presuming that was quite a hard thing to negotiate,
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to get right, I suppose.
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It's a beautiful question.
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And it's the heart of what I think I'm most interested in is what is goodness?
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I'm always somehow always interested in goodness,
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whether it's real or not.
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I've always felt that the people around me in my life,
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my brother, my partner, my friends,
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in some ways, I feel like they were born with this moral compass of goodness.
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Maybe they're not perfect.
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Everyone has sides, but I don't think I had that.
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I had to learn how to be good.
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It wasn't clear to me.
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And so I think I'm deeply in awe of that.
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And I wanted to see how goodness functions.
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It's easy to be good when you have the means to do so,
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to give, to be kind.
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It's very hard to be kind when you can't eat,
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when your home is leaking,
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you can't pay the bills,
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when you're strapped down and out of luck.
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It's very hard to be kind.
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And I wanted to ask myself,
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of how can these characters deceive each other benevolently?
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Is deception always bad?
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Is the chameleon always the demon or the devil, as we've often said?
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Anything that deceives is corrupt.
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And here, I wanted to showcase deception as an innovative mechanism towards care, towards equal exchange.
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When I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College,
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I had the great luck of having a professor teach a class on the Iliad.
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And he was a classicist,
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and he started the class by saying,
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I know you know this is a book about war.
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There's a lot of blood and a lot of battles,
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and sure, sure, sure, sure.
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But I'm going to present to you something that's the most important thing about this book.
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It's really a book about reciprocal bonds and civic duty and the breaking and the cohesion of those bonds.
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Everyone owes each other something and everyone guilt trips each other to go to pay the debts.
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And I was just so enamored of that concept of this,
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the idea that an ecosystem is moved by volunteering your most precious commodity,
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which is your body, to move towards care and what you owe each other.
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And I've always wanted to write a novel that centered an entanglement,
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a moral entanglement of reciprocal bonds.
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And so you're absolutely right.
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Every character both wants to give something to another,
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but they also want to take something from another.
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boy is that not humanity.
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You know, I mean, I,
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you know, everywhere I look,
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it's like that even the most benevolent,
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innocuous places in the world,
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there is that idea of what can I do for you?
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And we're also what do I owe you?
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And so when you have that pressure,
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the next greatest question is,
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what will I give you for free?
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What will I give you without asking anything back?
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And so that set up allows moments where these characters can finally give themselves out of pure love,
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which sounds, you know, saccharine to me,
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but I wrote the book to find out if it is feasible.
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You know, I don't know.
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You write, you send these characters off and you say,
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will you sacrifice yourself purely for another person based on your relationships?
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I don't know that answer,
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but writing the book, you find out.
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One of the other fascinating things of this book is,
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I suppose, it's about labour.
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It's about working for a living, basically.
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And this book is very much,
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as you said, about people who live on the margins,
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the working class in America.
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And it's a very complex topic.
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But what's interesting for Hai is he gets a job working in a restaurant called Home Market,
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where every day is Thanksgiving.
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And there is something, I suppose there is a nobility to that labour,
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which they go through every day.
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But there's an amazing scene where in order to make some extra money,
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they go to slaughter pigs.
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And it's a really, really grim reading experience, that whole thing.
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But there's some fascinating stuff in there,
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which I guess brings us to the emperor of the title.
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You mentioned the emperor hog,
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which is this amazing pig,
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but it's not called the emperor because it is an amazing animal.
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It is there to feed the real person in power,
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which is the emperor.
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And I suppose in many ways,
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you seem to be depicting the working class in America as people who are there to feed
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and fatten and enrich a different class of people,
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the people who are at the top of the money tree,
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if you like, in a capitalist society.
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So there's this mixture of the nobility of the labor,
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but the fact that they are being exploited by a system which they maybe don't realize is exploiting them so much.
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Is that a fair summation of,
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I suppose, your worldview of labor?
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I believe so.
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And the Hamlet epigraph helps me there in the beginning of the book.
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we fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots.
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And ultimately, death is the ultimate ending for all of this exploitation.
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And, you know, when I started to want to be a writer,
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I read the craft books.
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I've never taken a fiction workshop,
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so I can't speak on that.
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But I read, I love being a student.
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The truth is I like to learn more than I like to make.
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My excuse for writing books is I can just research and learn.
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Some people call that procrastination, I guess.
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So to me, when I was studying the craft fiction,
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which in the books that were available to me was this,
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you know, Western canonical movement and coming from Aristotle's decree
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that there should be catharsis at the end of the story to relieve the audience.
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So right away you have a very commercial negotiation.
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How do I please the audience?
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And a lot of fiction works this way.
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Well, you will find the killer.
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There will be the body.
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You will go from rags to riches.
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You will have a windfall.
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You'll get the girl, you get the guy, what have you.
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So there's a kind of reversal of fates, as Aristotle says.
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And it's very satisfying.
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I don't knock those stories.
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But it felt like a great lie to the American life that I was living.
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I don't know people like that in my community.
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My aunt works at FedEx.
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She's been doing that for 15 years.
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My brother works at Dick's Sporting Goods.
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My stepdad worked in Standardine Car Factory, car parts.
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My mother worked in a nail salon for 25 years.
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The people in my family drive the same car for 20 years.
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In other words, so much of American life is actually stasis.
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But in fiction, we think stasis is death, imaginative death.
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You must change.
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And I wanted to kind of be, to resist that.
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And I wanted to write a story where there is transformation without change.
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I hope it's not a spoiler,
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but nobody gets a better job.
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Nobody's position in life is altered,
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but they are altered by the relationships they have.
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And ultimately, is people who live lives in which they can't improve,
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which is beyond their capacity,
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beyond the system that doesn't allow them to improve, are they just worthless?
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Are they living meaningless lives?
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Of course the answer is no. I'm inspired by films like Kiss.
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And that film is so beautiful because it's all about a place that does not change.
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But the people and the love and the tenderness and the heartbreak is what makes that.
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So by divesting the novel from the plot of change,
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what I gain is the people.
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And ultimately, I think, if nothing else, I write about people.
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To finish off, I wanted to bring us back to the writing.
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There are a lot of amazing quotes in the book about writing.
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Hai has been somebody who has been interested in writing and has,
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I guess, lost faith in it as a means of expression.
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But there's a moment where Guzina says to him,
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you want to be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge.
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That's pretty much the same thing though.
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A writer just takes longer to hit the water.
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So I want to ask,
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first of all, are you okay?
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And B, what does that mean?
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Halfway down.
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Yeah.
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What do you mean by that?
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Or rather, what does she mean by that?
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And how does it apply to you as a writer?
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I'm always thinking and being informed by deaf,
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which I think is a little strange.
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Perhaps it's a Buddhist concept that a meditation on deaf is actually not so dark,
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but it's a reminder that all the petty,
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you know, bristling that we feel in life,
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all the vexations of the everyday goes away when we realize that we're all heading there.
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If we're very lucky, we'll have a deathbed.
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Many people don't have that luck.
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And so, you know, when we're on our deathbed,
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the way I saw my own mother's deathbed in I mean,
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all the fights we had,
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all the annoyances we had about life and our daily living felt so minuscule as to almost be myths.
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They were just so non-present.
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And I think for me,
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writing and thinking about death is ultimately an illumination about life.
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I think that's why I wanted to start this book with a meditation on death or near death,
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and to ask of these characters,
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if you're about to give it all up and you're one step away,
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what will the life look like when you decide to step back into the world?
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And I think that's a thesis I will forever be thinking about.
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And if I'm a very lucky writer,
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I will never find a finite answer to that.
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A fantastic note on which to end, Ocean.
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Thank you so much for giving the time to talk about the book.
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It's a pleasure.
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Like I said, I need to write books faster so I can talk to you more.
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No one's going to be complaining about that.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Take care.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
Engaging with Ocean Vuong's interview offers an unparalleled opportunity to refine your English speaking skills. As Vuong discusses his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, he not only captivates with his storytelling but also uses a rich tapestry of language that enhances comprehension and fluency. Listening to his eloquent descriptions, learners can practice the shadowing technique, where you mimic his voice and intonation in real time, which is excellent for improving pronunciation and rhythm. Moreover, as he reflects on the nuances of setting scenes and character development, learners can gain insights into how to articulate complex ideas effectively. Incorporating this video into your English speaking practice will enrich your vocabulary and foster confidence in your ability to convey detailed narratives.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Throughout the interview, Vuong employs several notable grammatical structures and expressions that English learners can incorporate into their dialogues:
- “I think you earn your moves for me.” - This phrase emphasizes the importance of patience in storytelling, demonstrating the use of present tense for expressing opinions.
- “This book, I was deeply interested in...” - The construction here illustrates a complex sentence where interest in a subject is communicated effectively, showcasing the need for varied sentence structures in English.
- “A place can come through, and that specificity becomes a universal symbol.” - This sentence highlights how specificity can resonate universally, inviting learners to explore the concept of metaphor and imagery in their speaking.
Understanding and practicing these structures can help learners articulate their thoughts with clarity, which is vital for effective communication.
Common Pronunciation Traps
In the video, Vuong's unique accent and articulation present a few challenges for English learners. Here are some common pronunciation traps to be mindful of:
- “Hyper-realistic” - The compound adjective may be tricky due to its length. Focus on clearly articulating each syllable: hy-per-real-is-tic.
- “A sacred space” - Listen for the smooth transition between words; try to practice linking them to sound more natural.
- “Commit my time and body” - Note the emphasis on time; practicing this phrase can help improve your stress patterns in speech.
Utilizing a shadowing app or similar tools can facilitate focused practice in overcoming these pronunciation challenges while preparing you for real-life conversations and enhancing your English speaking practice.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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