Transcript

Ocean Vuong on Class, Grief, and When He Plans To Call It Quits| Fresh Air

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· 52 min · 8,255 words · 135 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Ocean Vuong on Class, Grief, and When He Plans To Call It Quits| Fresh Air", an episode of Fresh Air published August 1, 2025 (52 min, about 8,255 words). It mentions 12 people, works and ideas, including Ocean Vuong, Agent Orange, To the Lighthouse, Our Town, Boston Market.

What this episode is about

Ocean Vuong discusses the impact of grief and family dynamics on his writing process, particularly in the context of his new book, which he views as a personal exploration of self without the influence of his late mother. He highlights his transition from writing for his family to embracing his own voice, integrating humor and authenticity while navigating the complexities of loss and the ethical considerations of storytelling.

Key takeaways

  • Death meditation: the ultimate hack to trivialize life's annoyances—why stress over emails when impermanence is a certainty?
  • Writing on your own terms means navigating grief; triumph can feel like betrayal in the shadow of loss.
  • Not all stories are autobiographical, yet every author weaves their essence into characters, creating an unbreakable bond.
  • Literary giants like Morrison paved the path, allowing new authors to walk in their shadow, yet each voice is unique.
  • Acknowledging systemic issues is a responsibility; putting an ‘expert face’ on cultural tragedies won't foster understanding.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Agent Orange, To the Lighthouse, East Gladness
  2. – 15:00: Boston Market, Standardine
  3. – 20:00: Marks, Mark Fischer
  4. – 25:00: Boston Market, Our Town
  5. – 30:00: Boston Market
  6. – 40:00: Ocean Vuong

Notable quotes from "Ocean Vuong on Class, Grief, and When He Plans To Call It Quits| Fresh Air"

  • So I think I'm I'm I it's important for me to push back again. The way Baldwin pushed back, the way Maxine Honkinson pushed back, I had great elders.
    about Maxine Hong Kingston · at
  • Have you asked the people who built weapons to come to terms? M have the CEO of Monsanto come to terms after making Agent Orange and now holding our food supply in hostage. And…
    about Agent Orange · at
  • Himself into manhood. And each morning you'd sit on the frost dusted bleachers, a worn copy of To the Lighthouse on your lap, and watch the players on the field, blue tomahawk…
    about To the Lighthouse · at
  • Standardine is a company in Connecticut.
    about Standardine · at
  • That's what I learned working at Boston Market because that's where you worked for how long?
    about Boston Market · at
  • Both a metaphor and not a metaphor. And I said, Ma, grandma, auntie, I figured it out. I read Marks. I read Benny Mean, Hannah Erant. I read Mark Fischer. I read Baldwin Morrison. I figured it out.
    about Marks · at
  • Absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned It's a Wonderful Life. That film was inspired by Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which came out about six years prior in 1939.
    about Our Town · at
  • To? And we believe in reincarnation as Buddhists. And she said, In the next life, I want to be a professor like you.
    about Ocean Vuong · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Ocean Vuong — Person · Main guest · 1 mention · first at
    Primary interview subject reflecting on writing, grief, class mobility, and literary lineage; repeatedly cited as the speaker describing his new book and influences.
  • Maxine Hong Kingston — Person · Referenced author / elder influence · 2 mentions
    Named alongside Baldwin as an ‘elder’ who pushed back against dominant cultural narratives; invoked as part of Vuong’s lineage and archive.
  • Gwendolyn Brooks — Person · Referenced poet (formal tradition example) · 2 mentions
    Cited in a lineage of poets who worked within/against the sonnet form; supports Vuong’s metaphor of the ‘sonnet’ as a cage requiring inward innovation.
    From Petroarch to Shakespeare to Gwendolyn Brooks.
  • Rigoberto Gonzalez — Person · Referenced peer (friend) / comparative example · 2 mentions
    Introduced as Vuong’s poet friend whose family background parallels themes of labor and delayed recognition; used to illustrate the pain of family not witnessing academic success.
    My friend, the brilliant poet, Rigoberto Gonzalez.
  • Mark Fischer — Person · Referenced theorist (likely Mark Fisher) · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as part of Vuong’s reading list to ‘figure it out’ about structural constraints; transcript spelling suggests ‘Mark Fischer’ but context strongly indicates cultural theorist Mark Fisher.
    I said, Ma, grandma, auntie, I figured it out. I read Marks. I read Benny Mean, Hannah Erant. I read Mark Fischer. I read Baldwin Morrison. I figured it out.

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

Places & events

  • East Gladness — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Lived in Connecticut a small town called Glastenberry and in the book is set in a fictional town East Gladness which I suspect is very similar to Glastonbury.

Full transcript with timestamps

Yeah. How long is your meditation practice? Just 15 20 minutes of breathing meditation and then I do deaf meditation.

What's that? Death meditation is this um kind of like a deep part of Buddhist meditation, particularly Tibetan meditation, where you contemplate the reality of death and you just contemplate it and then what happens is that all of a sudden all the petty things just shave away cuz you're like, "Oh, that's the ultimate. Why am I why am I why am I annoyed at that email?" you were nervous about this next book coming out and I wonder why.

I never expected to be to be to to write on my own terms so soon in my life. You know, I everything I did was for my family and I got really comfortable with that. You know, it was never a burden. Um but then when my my mother passed um I inherited my brother, my brother moved in. So my family got bigger. we moved and I started writing this book uh January 18th, 2020. And it's a book that I get to to be my full self as an author. And I know that sound triumphant, but it really didn't. I thought it would be. I was kind of excited. It was my way out of grief. I thought, "Okay, I'm fully an orphan now." You know, I said, "Goodbye, Mom.

I'm gonna I'm gonna write this without you. It's my first book from start to finish without her. And it was I felt like if I'm proud of it, I would betray her.

And when you say on your own terms, you mean exactly that because without her presence, even if it's on an unconscious level, you're not writing for her.

Yes. And this book is funny. I'm a funny person, you know, there's all of me in here. And the first book I was writing the history of my elders. I don't write their stories. I've never interviewed my family for my work. To me, it's very ethical, ethically clear for me to not have them expose their pain for my art. So, you know, there are things they've told me I'll take to the grave. They've taken to the grave. So I'm I'm inspired by their life in the same way Toltoy was inspired by his family.

Um but I don't mine their stories for my work. Um but because I knew that as Tony Morrison also knew that the majority of readers in America would be white that you know Morrison said that really brilliantly but she said I know that as an editor as a writer however I'm still writing for young black women. My intention and the market are two different things. Although I can acknowledge both and I'm so grateful for that model because I knew on earth were briefly gorgeous is my debut but it's my second book so I've been in publishing.

I knew that the majority of my readers most likely will be white but so I didn't want to invite folks to laugh at my elders. So that book was very somber

and this book is more my history and so there's a lot of humor in it. Um but it's still um full of grief because I I just I felt really icky about writing on my own. I haven't figured it out yet. I think there's so much shame in accomplishment for for someone coming from the working poor because every triumph is also a moment of immense loss. I want to unpack a few things that you said there. Number one, you know, I've always wondered and wanted to ask you who you were writing for. And so that Tony Morrison quote is really powerful.

But how do you reconcile the fact that you're writing so beautifully about people that while it's not autobiographical, it is really the essence of your experiences are infused in the characters that you write about. In this case, it's about a young man who lives in what some would consider a deadend town and he has decided to try to take his life and he encounters an older woman who is suffering from dementia and they form a friendship and he ends up taking care of her.

Um, but how do you reconcile the fact that so many of these people will never read the beautiful things that you write about them?

That's it, DA. That's it. That's that's the heartbreaking reality and I don't know if it could be reconciled. I think that's also important to to reclaim that we often ask we fetishize the author as an expert. We fetishize experts in this country. We always want an expert to show up on CNN and say something. Mhm.

You know, when the women were murdered in Atlanta at the massage parlors several years ago, right, that tragedy,

that tragedy, I was asked, come on and talk about it on these news programs. And I said,

you already know, but you want an Asian face to put a band-aid on this, right? But you already know the answers. You already know where this come from. You know about white supremacy. This is your country too. So I think I'm I'm I it's important for me to to push back again. The way Baldwin pushed back, the way Maxine Honkinson pushed back, I had great great elders.

These are all authors that you admire. What tremendous luck to come this late to the archive. You know, people say, "What do you have to say? It's all been written. It's all been done before." I said "No all how lucky I am to have a Tony Morrison." The entire catalog. Morrison had to write all that without a Morrison, Baldwin, Carlos Balosan, Virginia Wolf, they had to do that without themselves. I get them. Thank God. And so I don't reconcile it. I don't know how. I think it's important to often force that um irre irrevocable aporeia, the paradox back onto the culture because we always want to ask people who have experienced systemic racism, violence, oh, have you come to terms?

Have you asked the people who built weapons to come to terms? M have the CEO of Monsanto come to terms after making Agent Orange and now holding our food supply in hostage. And so I think for me my own terms is building the architecture and trusting that folks will find it. I found it. I found it in the public library. Let's get into um your origin story which which actually started um in Vietnam but you arrived here at 2 years old um lived in Connecticut a small town called Glastenberry

and um in the book the book is set in a fictional town East Gladness which I suspect is very similar to Glastonbury. Can I have you read an excerpt from the book that really describes this setting?

Sure. It's page five. Okay. And uh it's the first paragraph on page five. Oh, I love how your your um your book looks very well it looks old school. It looks like very well tattered and everything already.

It's the tour. It's the battered tour. It's a town where high school kids having nowhere to go on Friday nights park their stepfather's trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot drinking smearing off out of Poland spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they're 30some and the Walmart hasn't changed except for its logo brighter now lending a bluish glow to their time gaunt faces. It's where fathers in blue jeans fleck with wood stains stand at the edges of football fields watching their son steam in the red and dawn. One hand in their pocket, the other gripping a cup of Dunkin Donuts. They could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood. And each morning you'd sit on the frost dusted bleachers, a worn copy of To the Lighthouse on your lap, and watch the players on the field,

blue tomahawk shivering on their jerseys, their plastic pads crackling in the mist. And when you turn the page, it would slip right off the binding, flutter through the field, gathering inky blotches through the wet grass until it tangles between the boy's legs and disintegrates under a pair of black cleats. the words gone to ground that town.

What strikes me as is that so much of what is written about America and presented about America are the big cities and the big towns, but this reality is much more real and much more common.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's so seldom written about. I think we we really fetishize the stories that have these escape arcs and these improvement arcs, rags to riches. And the book is almost there's two products we expect from it. One is the binding, the book itself. There's a there's a barcode and then there's a second product that we expect the book to give which is the deliverable, the resolution, the, you know, he gets the girl, he gets the guy, you find the body,

the rags to riches, the rags to riches, the the glory. And it's so interesting because we see it in our films, we see it in magazines, even magazine stories, things that are written about me. refugee kid makes good, right? Writing his first book. So, the story, the profiles are all around that myth. Meanwhile, I grew up looking around. All I saw was stagnation in American life, but it didn't mean that it was doomed. If you ask, my stepdad worked at Stanadine.

What is Standard? Standardine is a company in Connecticut. It's no longer there. He worked there for 25 years and its entire manufacturing was to manufacture a single screw that went into gas pumps. And if you asked him a refugee who escaped by boat, living people, you know, relieving themselves on a tiny boat, throwing up overboard, seven days he spent at sea. And if you asked him, did you manage to live your American life the way you wanted without batting an eye, he would say yes.

It's very relative for me because when I looked at his life, I saw something full of loss. This man went to bed uh woke up at 300 p.m. to go to work, went to bed at 12:00 a.m. I never saw him. He never saw his kids. They never saw him. My mother never saw him. And I looked at that, I said, gosh, my I my life needs to be different.

Meanwhile, that was his triumph. And so to me, growing up, I realized that there are many versions of triumphs. And I'm not interested in the American dream so much as I'm interested in Americans who dream. Because him and I had two different dreams. Both of them are valid. And his dream might be my grief. my dream might be silly or incomprehensible to him, you know, because he would say, "What are you doing? Why are your line so short when I was writing my poem?" He said, "Why why don't you just finish it? Why are you stopping in the middle of the page? What is this?" Right? I just like I don't even know how to explain it, you know?

Well, one of the things that you do in this book, through the story, too, the main character, Hi, he works at a fast food restaurant. And so, I'm thinking about your stepdad working in a factory. He had a family of circumstance as well.

Yeah. At work. Yeah. In that same way. And those relationships, they're so fleeting, but they can be so deep as well.

Yeah. Because that you depend on each other. And no ideology is strong enough to withstand kinetic kinship.

That's what I learned working at Boston Market because that's where you worked for how long?

Three years. Three years. Yeah. You also worked at other fast food restaurants.

Panera Bread as well. Yeah. Two very different places. But actually two very different places because they serve different communities. One was more upscale. Panera Bread was a little more upscale than Boston Market, but it was still minimum wage 715.

Um we you you still feel it. Um but you you realize that people were kind of stuck. the the the shift was a trap. The fast food restaurant was a trap.

Meaning there was no place of mobility to move up and and everybody knew that. But we didn't dare say it. That was the elephant in the room. And then I thought, you know what else is is a is a cage? The sonnet. The the sonnet is credited as one of the most innovative forms in angoponic poetry. From Petroarch to Shakespeare to Gwendelyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, so many people have participated in it. 14 lines, you have a vulta, a turn at the 10th and 12th line and that's it. And what I realized was that, oh, American life is kind of like a sonnet.

the shift, the fast food restaurant, my stepdad's factory, the HUD housing. You know, my mother sat me down one day and said, "You have to work at Can you try to work at McDonald's?" This is me as a 16-year-old.

Yeah. As soon as I was eligible to work, I said, "What? What about the American dream? What about upward mobility? I I'll try my I can do other things." M. She said, "No, no, no, no. You need to work at McDonald's because if you make too much, we'll get kicked out of here

as a family income." That's a sonnet. And so we have this fantasy of breaking out, escape, upward mobility. It's very cathartic. We go to the movies and we see this because it confirms the myth of the American dream. But so much of America is really a cage. And a cage is also a sonnet. And a sonnet you have to innovate inwards. You have to depend on people. And I felt like, you know, what is it to be an American? And I thought maybe to be an American is to be trapped in a free country.

You can vote one way or another, but your taxes is going to go to pharmaceuticals. It's going to go to weapons that you don't vouch for. And you're told you get two choices, left or right, red or blue. And that in itself is a trap. The political system has trapped us into two bad decisions. And it's a it's like a broken record. But I've seen this actually replicated in every factor of American life. And the saddest thing I I wonder how you feel about this. The saddest thing is that my family were so happy that I wanted to study and read,

right? They said, "Go on." I never had tiger parents. Never had a tiger mom. It's for me to say that to push against that stereotype. You know,

she just wanted you to survive. She said, "Gosh, none of us have read before." Yeah. So if you can read, read anything, especially what you don't understand. Go into the unknown. And so I went and when I would come home, it takes 15, 20 years of study to find out what has happened to your community

to understand it. God, to understand where you come from. Yep. and that it's not an accident that that it was designed for them to never get out. So I'm, you know, so my family sent me off and I spend the years reading and I and I come home. This is both a metaphor and not a metaphor. And I said, "Ma, grandma, auntie, I figured it out. I read Marks. I read Benny Mean, Hannah Erant. I read Mark Fischer. I read Baldwin Morrison. I figured it out. It's not your fault. It was made for you to not get out. It's not your fault. I I I learned it. I I I It took me 15, 20 years. All those times in the library, I figured it out. Let me let me tell you. And you come home, you bus home into the house, and nobody's there anymore.

It's too late. Yeah. How do you reconcile that? Because you know I I will say when I I I've heard you talk about this. I've read you talking about this. I often get jealous like there's the actor Anthony Anderson who every award show that he does he has his mom in the audience.

He takes her to everything that he can. And I feel so jealous because he's able to do it. He figured it out in time

and he allowed her the chance to experience it. Your mom had she had a little bit of a moment to experience your success.

She had a sliver. Yeah. I still dream about that sliver. But I've had friends, you know, my friend, the brilliant poet, Rigberto Gonzalez, his family came from Mexico. They were fruit fruit pickers in California. That's how he grew up. He grew up on those farms in a basket while they picked fruit as an infant. And I talked to him about this. He said, "My mother never saw me become a professor." And and you're right that that that you know I wish my mother could see all this but again most of folks in our community don't even have this let alone mothers to witness it.

There's something you do that's really powerful that you make the reader confront in this novel. Hi, as I mentioned, the protagonist, he has decided that maybe he wants to die and he's intercepted by this relationship with um this 82year-old woman who's suffering from dementia. He ends up being her caregiver. And every moment in the book as I'm turning the page after I realize that, I'm thinking, um, he wanted to die, but he's living another day.

Yeah. And in that living another day, it's very it's very much like um that that classic movie It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart, you know, where he says, "I want to live." But there's something in it where these mundane everyday things now seem

kind of beautiful. These interactions he's having with his colleagues in this fast food restaurant that are so deeply human.

Yeah. Um, it's almost a reframe of the mundane day-to-day life. Absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned It's a Wonderful Life. That that film was inspired by Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which came out about six years prior in 1939. And those two works um bracket World War II.

And so this book takes place during the Afghan and Iraq wars. And this book is also haunted by wars and and I I fel I was always suspicious when you know you see news segments and people said somebody was on a bridge and they were talked down and everybody claps and I always thought are they really clapping for the person or are they clapping because normal society has been restored

because nothing says we are not well than somebody standing on a bridge and I always wonder cuz that's usually when the cameras turn off. All right. Phew. Back to normal. But I'm like, actually, that person has stepped away from a ledge into a corner. Suicide at the end of the day, we might not want to think it as such, but it is an act of hope. One does it with the hope of ending a man's suffering. And so, if you take away the option, if God forbid, they do turn back, right? They do. They make they find a way to to, you know, God willing, they find a way to come back. They still don't have the answers. They don't have any way forward. They've been off the ledge into a corner. And what's day two look like?

What's day 20 look like for them. And we have been fed that we have to go out and find meaning and find a reason to live. It's a very it aligns with with commercial um

yes desires. Go out and buy your reason to live. Sign up for another class. Take a retreat. Do more yoga. And the goalpost keeps getting moved while our bank accounts get drained for happiness. And I felt like happiness as it functions in America has been quite tyrannical. We've weaponized happiness. And this book is more about being okay

because we we want the grand narrative, right? Let me let me instill and and my own edit to a wonderful life is that it's not an angel that saves you. It's not Clarence the angel. It's just another citizen in your community. And

in this case for Hi, yeah, it's Branzina who's slipping out of the world with dementia. And it's interesting because he sees her and he's the one that breaks the assignment of death because he sees her lose her laundry. I'm not revealing any too much here, but she loses her laundry to the wind and then he goes, it's muscle memory. He goes, "Hey, your sheets." And then she's like, "What? There's a kid in the bridge." And that moment is so important to me because I'm like, "Oh, I don't think it's the big big juicy meaningful epiphies.

It's actually he lives because he forgot to die. That's it." Because he's realizing that somebody else is in more need than he is. And so I think it's these kind of random sites of care propelled by time that drag us deeper deeper into these spaces. There's a there's a moment that I've been thinking about that I didn't put in the book because it's it's a little too dramatic and I didn't know what to do with it. But there was this quintessential moment of of these laborers coming together. There was a woman in her 30s and we were closing up.

This is at Boston Market. We were closing up for the night about 30 minutes to close. And she gets this phone call on the landline. No, we didn't really have, you know, iPhones. And the phone call basically said her brother had overdosed. And that night, her brother was in the hospital. We finished the shift. We closed out. And there was this unspoken reality. Nobody said it, but we all knew we were not going to go home.

I I still think about that like we clocked out. We're not paid. The lights are off. Say for the little fluorescent light by the sink and we're sitting in this Boston market just holding vigil

for her and her brother because we how can you I mean but I'm interested in I'm like where does that kind of kindness come from? Where does it who taught us that? It's like the elephants.

Every year they come back and they touch the bones of their dead and the eldest gets to do it first and they form a line. And I'm like, what is it about our species that came with that? This is a question that you've been asking yourself. I think you use the term what is kindness without hope.

That's it. That's it. But then I I also want to interrogate that a little bit because

is it kindness without hope? Can you be kind without hope? Yeah, there's sort of a hope embedded in kindness because there's some some sort of faith in many instances that really bind all of this together.

That's it. That's a better word for it, huh? Faith. because you don't know it is you you there is so much faith required in doing something knowing there's no guarantee that it will pay off I mean that's what spiritual faith is

is there something after all this and I think that is the better word for it that we there was this faith and but I go back and I say well where does that come from

you know we're told in this country that you have to pull yourself from the bootstraps everybody for himself every man for himself, individualism. And yet the in the working poor communities, the black and brown communities that I grew up in, the the generosity came first. That sort of doggy dog world was shameful. If you articulated that, say that in front of somebody's grandma, you'll be corrected, right? you know, say that you're going to go out and top every top topple everything, you know, crush everybody with profit and power and somebody will remind you that there's somebody up there watching either ancestors or right, you know, something else. So, there was I I actually class mobility has been really strange for me.

I'm in these spaces where it's mostly upper middle class folks, academia, publishing, and I found like a totally different set of ethos

and values in values. And that ricochet I was never prepared for. I'm still not prepared for it. You ask me, have I come to terms? I don't think I ever will.

I want to hold on to that thought because I I really want to go there with you about that class mobility. But on the subject of kindness and I'm thinking about that cuz this is a true story that happened when you were working at Boston Market where your colleague received this call that her brother had odied and you guys decided to stay. Do you think that suffering is on that maybe kindness is a byproduct of suffering?

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You're on to something there. Because why I'm asking why did that happen? Because we all we are all close to that reality. There is empathy there. Gosh, you're you're taking me deep, Tanya, because I think that's it. And what what we're figuring out together here because that's the demarcation between the two class systems. You are closer the proximity of suffering. We we knew neighbors were falling. We knew sons and daughters were going missing and we knew people were being fetched out of rivers. This goes beyond just opioids, right? We knew and I think the the the proximity of that. We also knew we could be next.

That's it. That's what I've been feeling most of my life as a you know well-known author is that I'm like I there's rooms where I'm in where I'm like I don't think you know

or if you know you don't know enough you don't know like the way I've seen it and there's no way to articulate that to anybody

right unless they know and I think that's why we didn't have to say it. Nobody had to say we're going to stay here because we all knew we could be next and we all know either we already felt that or we saw somebody an auntie or a neighbor who felt that and that's what it is is that we we knew that it was inescapable and that when it's our turn we would want the same thing. So it's almost anticipatory compassion

cuz we often even in Buddhism you talk about compassion as something suffering already there but when you're conditioned in this economic ceiling you have now anticipated your grief.

Yes. You're ready for it. It's a it's a mode that you switched on. I was so young I didn't know. I was just following I was the youngest one in that group and we had folks in their 40s and 50s and they kind of said we're not their body language we're not leaving and I followed suit just like what you do in a community but you're helping me think through that and I think for me it was it was that we were bounded by anticipatory grief. We were grieving before things happened because we knew they were going to happen. And that is so beautiful and so so tragic.

I want to talk to you about this class mobility thing and the loneliness though of it because you're now in elite circles. You're teaching at an elite university. You are a well-known author, best-selling book author. Um, you grew up where your mother did not know how to read. You did not know how to read until you were 11.

Your mom worked at a nail salon. Um, and in these elite circles, they can read your work, but they'll never truly feel and know.

And yet the people that you grew up with, they feel and know. But do they care really about the things that you've seen? The stuff that you come home to share with them.

It's a privileged place to be in. Yeah. But it is it also a lonely place. It is. But I prefer that they don't care.

I'll say more on that. Yeah. Because when I come home, I'm I'm just one more. I'm just one more of the litter, you know. And also, here's another thing. Why should they care? M just because the New Yorker says what I do is valuable, just because Time magazine or NYU or Yale says what I do is valuable. Why should all of a sudden that value system be foisted on them? They never had time to read a book. My mother worked from 8:00 a.m. 8:00 p.m. If somebody walks in at 7:55, she has to do their nails. She's not leaving till 9:00. When do you read a book? If you can afford a $30 hardback, when do you read it? So time, the idea of engaging in this product is expensive on the soul, on the body. And I'm really proud actually that they they don't I because some authors, their work comes home with them. Their aura, their fame comes home with them. And I I can't even bring it home cuz nobody cares.

Nobody cares. like like oh book cool put it you know put it aside you know fried die lay it aside you know

but they do care in some instance because you're caring for a lot of relatives like you're financially yes

caring for how many is it nine people nine people cousins brothers extended family and

they're proud they're really proud they they you know my aunt actually um she has a little um album of all of my press cutings and she puts it under her her desk at the nail salon.

Yeah. And she whips it out, you know, cuz she doesn't think anyone will believe her. It's also interesting. She said, "I I'm keeping all your press clippings cuz people don't think I don't think they're going to believe me if I say my nephew is Ocean Vong, you know." And so they're very proud of the significance. And I think also like you know my aunt was the first one that told me she says I was talking to to to your op about Oprah um and my nephew is an Oprah pick at the salon and all the people at the salon they start googling all the other nail workers and then the first thing they said was he's the first Vietnamese American Oprah pick and like and they probably never read an Oprah pick you know I know they haven't read an Opra pick um cuz I did ask and but they were proud of that. So there is a kind of um symbolic pride but I I don't for force what I value on to them because I don't think

it's fair. You know just because you know elite legacy media or whatever um institutions find my work valuable doesn't mean that it should be valuable to them when it's it never has been. And that's okay. That's okay.

Growing up though, did you feel a certain sense of class betrayal? I think that's something that you've mentioned about because my sense is that you've always been who you are that you love to read. Uh once you discover that as a medium and how do you reconcile that to being yourself but also being one of the litter?

I don't read in front of my family. You still don't? I still don't. Why? Because there's a sense of I think ache when they see it. And I know even when they oh go do it. But there's a kind of

when I start to read in front of them, everything everybody goes silent. It It's like the room

when you're reading like like even like a magazine. I'm just reading a magazine in the corner in front of my family. everything goes silent because they they they because they're illiterate. It's they have so much reverence for it as if I'm performing some kind of liturgy or magic, right? And that saddens me because and it was like everyone shans reading as if I'm doing something like a wizard, right? And and so and also my mother when when when I would read early on in my college life, she she would she was I wish I could do that.

She said, "Just so you know, just so you know, if I had a chance, I would read, too."

And when she was dying, this is like the days still in the hospital. And and I was asking her, you know, you say, and we knew it was terminal. And and I just said, "What do you need, mom? Anything. What do you want to do? What do you want to?" And we believe in reincarnation as Buddhists. And she said, "In the next life, I want to be a professor like you."

Ocean because and she she don't she don't know what that is, right? And you're told, you're told you you're you always thought that you look up to your mom. And I did. And I did not know she was looking up to me the whole time, you know. And I just thought gosh you know, but she she was so proud to say that, you know. She was I want to be a professor. I just want to do my next life. I want to read. I want to do everything I could do.

How do you hold on to I can imagine and I'm saying this cuz it's me. Okay. Yeah.

When my mother has said those types of things to me like I can't even begin to express that you are because it is because of you.

Yeah. Yeah. because I I I did what I can because I knew she couldn't have the capacity.

Yeah. I was doing it along with her, you know, the whole time. But that knocked me out, you know, her saying that. I thought, you know, I thought she was going to say, "Give me a glass of juice or something," you know, and then she just

I want to be a professor like you in the next life. In my in my next life. In my next life. It's like the saddest thing I've ever heard.

Do you hold any like thoughts to the afterlife and what she can see and what what she's a part of this reality in this moment now?

I don't know, but I feel her. You know, people talk about a lot of folks ask me, "How can you be so vulnerable?" And I think what they mean is how how can you be so strong and talk about these things?

Yeah. People say, "How could you be so charismatic in front of crowds and talk about these things?" I said, "It's not charisma.

It's not power. It's not strength. It's fortitude. I walk into these spaces fortified by the blessing of my elders." And it's important for me to say this because so much of Asian-American life is about making art despite or against our family's wishes. And I know that's true. But for me, I always had their blessing even though they didn't know what I was doing. It was so strange to them, but they never said no to me. So when I walk into a place like this or or when I walk into the classroom or on stage, my mother, my grandmother, my teachers, living and dead, my partner, my brother, I come in with their blessing and there they have vouched for me. So I do feel completely invincible in that sense. M

the body I can't speak to that that will degrade and fall apart but mentally spiritually I feel invincible because that's the only thing I care about their blessing and I was so so lucky to have that and so to me it's not charisma it's fortitude they're all with me they have they are the wind in my sail and they're the wind in my sales when I sit down to write my mother came I would come home from college she used to embarrass me so much. They would have um her friends from the factories and the nail salons would come and have dinner and I would sit there and she would say she would grab my hand. She's like, "Come, look at my son's hands. Look how soft they are.

Come over here, Miss Do. Come here. Touch touch it. You won't." I was like, "Mom, what? This is so embarrassing. It's so weird." you know, and now I I I look back and I remember that all of their hands were battered. And in in writing, we have context and subtexts. And the subtext of what she was saying to those people, to her peers, to her community was, "Look what I prevented."

Right? Look what I did. I didn't understand it clearly. Look what I did. He his hands is this soft because he only holds pens. She said that. And so to me when I do the work people say how can you do it? It's so hard. It's so emotional. I said I it's nothing compared to what they've done. And not only that, I get to do the work because of them. The bill has been paid

right in full. I mean that whole idea of soft hands, soft life in a way. You know

what I'm hearing from you though too is like the burden of that that you carry knowing it's a burden but it's also a gift.

You always are sitting in such deep places. What's your relationship to happiness, to joy,

to fun? I take it whenever I can get it, you know. Um, I mean to to me happiness is really brutal. And I think one of the most painful things we can say to our loved ones is I just want you to be happy.

Really? Why? Because it's so hard, right? And out of mill all the millions of books written in our species, we still do not have a direct immediate and guarantee manual to it. It's subjective. It's random. And and in a way we say that I want you to be happy as if it's like a low bar.

Yeah. Like you could get there pretty quickly. Yeah. Like you don't have to be a lawyer.

Just be happy. Right. And I I I think about that and I said, gosh, that is so hard. Maybe there's another way. Maybe there's we can say I want you to be fulfilled,

content, okay? Also because hyperbolic expressions like happiness, joy have been all co-opted by advertising language and it creates these sort of utopias that are unreachable and not supposed to be reachable. And so those those words have been co-opted by corporations and we're not supposed to meet them because if we do we won't buy anything. So what happens we we the the ideas of okayness and contentment have been left untouched, right? You'll never hear, you know, a company Coca-Cola say, "Drink this and you'll be decent."

Yeah. Your your thirst will be quenched. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting your thoughts about joy and happiness and fun. Your sweater there,

it says joy division. Yeah. Yeah. It's a band I love. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's also a message though. It's a band, but it's also saying something when you enter a room.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What is it saying? I was in an elevator with uh someone who didn't know it was a band at my apartment and she came in. She's like, "We need more of that. We sure need more of that these days." And I did. I forgot. I was like, "What?" I have no social skills in public. I could do this forever, but I'm like I'm like, "What?" And she's like, "That I'm" I'm like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah." Right.

But I think it is like it's like the thing about like a division of joy, right? There's it's a double antandra. It's like a a sector, but also can it be divided,

right? Is there enough for all of us? And if we spread it all out, is it just okay?

Mhm. That wouldn't be so bad. Okay. Is um un undermined. It's it's it's a vast area of for us to explore. And I think it allows us a lot of grace. I thought you don't have to be happy. just be all right with me.

Yeah. And wherever you are is enough. That that's I think to me it's much more radical than asking about demanding happiness from us because it's especially to children. I mean it's when parents say you know I just want my kids to be happy and you look at the kid and they're just like what is that

and what does it mean? Do I have to now perform happiness in front of my family? And you know, to be honest, my mother never said that to me.

It was interesting. She always said, "Do what you want." And I think that's kind of what I've been doing as a writer. And I I think for me, the culture Oh, this is so rich, Ocean, because there's something else I've just always wanted to talk to you about is where you get that freedom within to write freely.

Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging that I'm not proud of many things, but I'm really proud of having been able to do what I want on my own terms on the page.

And I just want the audience to really understand because I know you understand what I'm saying, but like not the freedom in the act to write, but the freedom

on what you put on the page to write the way I want to write. Yes. Yeah. And it's the way I want to write is not always approved by critics. To me, I want the sentence to be pushed to the limit. In the same way, drag performers push everything to the limit. It's too much. And in our society where restraint is and cleanliness and order and minimalism is an upper middle class privilege. One thing I notice now that I'm in, you know homes of that are very different, you know, man, let's just put it this way. Now that I've been invited

into mansions and yeah, money, I noticed something really interesting that the the rich is is often the rich are often terrified of the body. M

you go into a home that is $10 million and you realize first of all they're servants but the the accutramonts of living are out of sight. You don't see vitamin bottles. You don't see brooms. You don't see plates, mugs. The whole thing looks like a museum. You don't even you know you might not even know where the kitchen is. You'll know you'll never see it. Things on ordurves on plates. Everything is hidden. And growing up poor, there was no place to put anything. The the the material of living and tending to the body was right in the living room.

Yeah. Right. And it's like I think the the the the fetishization of power and money is that you you almost forget the body. The body is an afterthought. There is nothing. It doesn't leak or bleed. It doesn't relieve itself. All that is hidden away into this sleek fantasy. And we see this in the aesthetics of art as well and writing that we want reserved, restrained, clean lines. And these things are seen as control. But there are control that is the privilege of the elite and the rich because if you have a place to store all that, if you have servants to sweep for you, you don't have to look at a book.

You don't have to look at it. Right? Because critics have have said, at least one critic has called you earnest and that this writing in this book is just over-the-top earnest

and and you've actually kind of boked at that to say that like to be earnest is not a bad thing.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it's a thing of honor, you know, to try to commit to something to see the sentence as a laboratory. rather than a performance of power or status. So to me, every sentence has to be pushed has to be pushed to new grounds because it's a medium that I'm trying to see how big is it? Can it hold me? Can it hold all this? In the same way, drag is offensive to many people because it's too much. It is and and this is also racialized, right? You know, growing up in black and brown communities, many people thought the women around me were too much. Their nails were too long, too colorful, too many sequins.

And to me, there's there's a racialized class critique of that. And to me, I want to hunker down because these are the ideas that made me. I have been forced to assimil ass assimilate in this country so many times and I refuse to assimilate again in my aesthetics because that that kind of oh too much that kind of exuberance and earnestness because nobody puts on you know their nails cynically. Nobody decorates themselves. You know, the the woman that I most

earn is pride. It's pride. It's earnest. It's all in. You put it's a wager, right? The people in my community when they dress themselves, they're showing that they can care for themselves. When they dress their children, they say, "Look how much I can provide." It's a symbolic gesture. And so to me, restraint is something I'm not interested in. It don't mean nothing to me. And I think the problem is that the elite white framework only has one way to look at you. And if you don't fit in, they assume you're wrong and they don't assume that what you're doing is deliberate and on purpose. But the legacy is full with people who broken those molds. And I've been really blessed. I can't I can't sit here and complain because readers have found my work and know what I'm trying to do.

And that has been I don't know if I would have the career I've had if I was a writer in the 50s and 40s. I had to come in 20 in the 21st century because now opinions and aesthetics is in the hands of readers because of social media but also because I've had a robust lineage of black and brown and Asian writers to lean on that came before me. I really appreciate you taking this time. Ocean,

thank you for making space for me and and and for us, Tanya. It's always a pleasure.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Ocean Vuong on Class, Grief, and When He Plans To Call It Quits| Fresh Air"?

Tanya (Host), Ocean Vuong (Guest).

What is "Ocean Vuong on Class, Grief, and When He Plans To Call It Quits| Fresh Air" about?

Ocean Vuong discusses the impact of grief and family dynamics on his writing process, particularly in the context of his new book, which he views as a personal exploration of self without the influence of his late mother. He highlights his transition from writing for his family to embracing his own voice, integrating humor and authenticity while navigating the complexities of loss and the…

What is mentioned in this Fresh Air episode?

12 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Ocean Vuong, Agent Orange, To the Lighthouse, Our Town, Boston Market, Maxine Hong Kingston. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Ocean Vuong on Class, Grief, and When He Plans To Call It Quits| Fresh Air"?

The episode runs 52 min; the transcript is about 8,255 words in 135 timestamped sections.

More from Fresh Air

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.