Resisting Bleak Realities

“If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.” — Ocean Vuong, from “Immigrant Haibun”

The line from “Immigrant Haibun” captures the tragedy of reckoning with survivor’s guilt in adolescence, and its reappearance as the opening line of The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong’s sophomore novel, is a classic example of Vuong’s recursive style. Once used to characterize a Vietnamese refugee family’s boat journey, the line finds a second life in The Emperor of Gladness, opening a story where a young writer mired by guilt uses his observant eye and the transformative power of storytelling to help support and restore dignity to others.

Hai, a young Vietnamese American man from East Gladness, Connecticut, is stopped from attempting suicide by Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian woman living with dementia. They come to strike a deal: in exchange for free room and board, Hai will step in as her home nurse. Their unlikely friendship roots Hai once again to East Gladness, where he reconnects with his cousin Sony and finds unexpected kinship at HomeMarket, a fast-casual restaurant chain. Time and time again, Hai attempts to do right by his friends and family, even as he copes with the burden of his lies, grief, and addiction.

Hai’s observations restore dignity to his companions, but The Emperor of Gladness offers no lasting resolution for its characters, reflecting Vuong’s perspective that for many, their material conditions do not change. Therein lies a narrative cynicism that results in what Vuong admits to be the story’s “limpness.” In exchange, however, the story is profuse, even insistent, with nostalgia for people and places of East Gladness swallowed by time. The diligent reader is given the chance to linger in these memories. Embedded in this heart-aching story of young, hyphenate American grief is a rendering—in awe—of working-class grit and comradery in the face of exploitation, violence, and neglect. Relying on historical and literary allusions, Vuong criticizes American overconsumption by weaving an elaborate connection between emperors, hogs in the meat industry, the working class American, and war. The titular “emperor” is a recurring motif of paradox: though representative of supreme power, the sole living Emperor today, Japan’s Naruhito, is only able to exercise it symbolically. Likewise, Hai stands alone, with little power—except his talents as an observer and writer. Vuong also takes care to illustrate the profound power of storytelling in shaping each of his characters’ lives outside of Hai’s. While working a gig at the slaughterhouse, Hai’s coworker Wayne tells a story about how emperor hogs came to be:

…England was trying to get into Japan—you know, to do missionary shit or whatever—they tried to win over the emperor by giving him these Berkshire hogs. Well… The emperor was so amazed by the flavor of these hogs, so rich with fat, sweet and juicy, he opened his doors wide open. And that’s how Christianity came to Japan. Through pork. That’s why they call them ‘emperor hogs.’… So they tried to make a breed of them out here in Connecticut.

Another coworker, named Russia, quips: “If being called an emperor meant getting your throat cut in the name of Christ… then you can go ahead and call me a peasant.” Russia empathizes with the hogs, blurring the line between him (the laborer, the analogous peasant) and the hog (the emperor). The boundary between the two is shown to be exceedingly thin, physically and mentally: nightmares of squealing hogs plague the workers, echoing the experience of soldiers suffering from PTSD, causing the workers to drink themselves to sleep. The slaughterhouse is nauseatingly described:

In supermarkets, the meat looks so serene, placid, calm, like something formed in a studio. Here—among Slipknot and the alloyed blood, breath, and gastric fumes bubbling from gashed esophagi, the grass dyed yellow with stomach viscera, these animals with faces so human, eyelashes blond and thick, so expressive it felt like they should have names, so much so that Hai had to look away as he pulled the trigger—the work was chaos.

To do his job, Hai enters a dissociative state, wielding the only power available to him—figural, symbolic, twisting his perception of reality. He must force himself to see each hog’s ears as a nonliving piece of fabric to systematically kill them with a bolt gun. Such a visceral scene calls to mind the work of Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, published over a century ago in 1905:

They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek…

Vuong closely follows Sinclair’s path in lamenting the indignity of hog slaughter. Even a century later, both worker and hog are used up and expended by a system that has not ceased to exploit.

In resistance to this bleak reality, Vuong later transforms Hai and the HomeMarket crew into a queer version of the Holy Family. Near the end of the novel, in spring, Hai, Grazina, and the HomeMarket crew rest in a barn for the night, alluding to a nativity scene filled with tenderness. While the reader may feel some surprise at the distinctly spiritual glint of the scene, Vuong establishes in the first chapter that this is his express intent in writing about East Gladness:

…everything green grows as if in retribution for the barren, cauterized winter [as if]…. the glacial flood returned overnight and made us into what we were becoming all along: biblical. (emphasis added)

Up until this point, the narrative is largely written with a humanist perspective, affirming our universal dignity based on the characters’ memories, their acts of kindness toward each other, and their persistent desire for human connection. So, why does Vuong transition toward a religious reading of Hai and the HomeMarket crew? Perhaps, similarly to how one might read the hogslaughter in the context of Sinclair’s The Jungle, there is emphasis on the absurdity of inequality which still endures, even long after the Bible’s advocacy for the equitable treatment of those with lesser status in society on the basis of their dignity and piety. Asserting that there is a biblical quality to these characters affirms their spiritual life and value; Vuong thus challenges the logic of capitalism that has subjected them to casual violence and neglect.

It is a close reader’s delight to find images and themes from Vuong’s past works throughout The Emperor of Gladness. Vuong writes with insistence on self-referentialism, replaying past events of his life with characters that only barely change as they’re adapted from project to project, as with his grandmother and Grazina, Noah and Trevor, or Hai and Little Dog (from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous). Readers familiar with Vuong’s poem “Nothing,” which features the real-life Grazina’s escape from Stalin and the Red Army during World War II, will recognize Vuong’s favored symbols of domesticity, trauma, catharsis. His works seem driven by the belief that our core selves can be captured by the thoughts (i.e., images, symbols, lasting echoes of memory) that stay with us even as we experience life’s inevitable transformations. Perhaps this provides solace to Vuong, whose work continually attempts to bridge his traumatic childhood to the radically different reality that life has thrust him into, materially and emotionally. This is the man who now laments, “Oh, to live like a bullet, to touch / people with such purpose” (“Nothing”). It’s unexpectedly violent, endlessly quotable, and a familiar theme for Vuong, who often links the symbolism of violence to sex, healing, release, and peace.

Why are these concepts so closely linked with violence for Vuong? We find hints in Vuong’s depiction of the veterans of East Gladness, who “[shuffle] back into smoky rooms where mini-TVs, the size of human torsos, lull them to infinite sleep;” in Hai’s curious tendency to form sexual bonds with others having similar traumas (e.g., Russia, the veteran-mechanic); in a playful quote, as fall comes to East Gladness: “[Hai] shoots the old lady and nothing happens.” It may be that a life defined by trauma can no longer separate comfort from symbols of violence—the trauma stays with you. To move on, one must believe that these symbols can take on new meaning. Vuong offers a perfect example of this with Grazina. For her, the only way out of her hallucinations is through them, so Hai steps into them as Sergeant Pepper, a young soldier who guides Grazina to safety as World War II draws to a close:

These gunfights, a dream inside a dream inside an illusion, occurred around three times a week, where they’d fire at each other throughout the house, their finger-pistols locked and loaded as they crouched among the floral furniture. They were on an old dairy farm pasture, he’d tell her, or stopped over on the side of the road by a shelled village, a grove of pines, gunmetal light splintering through the leaves.

These re-enactments recall photographer An-My Lê’s Small Wars (1999-2002), where Lê spent four summers with a group of men from Virginia who restaged Vietnam War battles to their utmost detail as a serious pastime. Like herself, the men rarely had military combat experience but harbored complicated personal histories tied to the Vietnam War, like losing a father or brother. Lê imagines that everyone is trying to resolve their personal baggage in these events. Both Small Wars and Grazina and Hai’s re-enactments seem to insist that the performance or ritual of battle, without the violence itself, has a healing quality. Re-enactors are those who did not die in the violence the first time, and to come together as survivors is to witness each other’s guilt, and be less lonely in bearing that guilt of living.

While The Emperor of Gladness keenly depicts Vietnamese American family dynamics we resonated with and the survivor’s guilt that pushes us to redeem our parents’ sacrifices, it also featured assertions and scenes about Vietnamese American identity that left us feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps this discomfort is only natural–to be a subject is to be rendered imperfectly–but this discomfort, paired with Vuong’s literary acclaim, led us to ask our Vietnamese friends and family, the subjects of Emperor of Gladness (who, by Vuong’s acknowledgment, would otherwise never have time or be able to read in English) how they felt about it all: weird.

Weird, exhibit A: Hai’s memory of his Bà ngoại when the family eats Pizza Hut for the first time. Vuong writes:

Bà ngoại picked up the white plastic divider thing they put in the center of the pizza and set it to the floor. “You see this thing? This is why we always buy from Pizza Hut. They have respect for ancestors….No other restaurant ever thought to give you a little table to serve the spirits with. Only Pizza Hut.” She tapped the crust with her fingernail and smiled…Bà ngoại clasped her hands together and, in a low voice, started inviting their dead to come feast on this one piece of mushroom supreme pizza, her body swaying as she chanted…

Bà ngoại’s reverence of a relatively mundane item in American life is, at face value, humorous. In numerous scenes like this, she’s given lease to be a fun, spunky woman with an uninhibited humor, echoing Grazina’s own rambunctious style. While refreshing, this depiction comes at a cost that may not be worth the inevitable caricaturization of the elderly and of Vietnamese people. It’s a moment tinged with something adjacent to dramatic irony–we not only know more than Bà ngoại, we know better than her. We see her in a tender light, but a shadow creeps in, the sense that she is making a fool of herself by chanting and swaying, uncritical of the world and her assumptions. Many children of immigrants feel this pain, and we can keenly recall this moment of suspense; we wait for the “shoe to drop” and the shock of reality that will come. Yet the scene continues:

[Hai] discovered later that the plastic thingy, shaped like a dollhouse lawn table, was there to prevent the top of the pizza box from crushing the pie during delivery.

“The owners of Pizza Hut,” Bà ngoại said, glancing at her daughter, “they actually thought about people like us. Can you believe it? Americans making pizza thought of Vietnamese customs.” She sighed and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “That’s why we support them. Good folks,” she said, reaching for another slice.

The shoe does not drop. Our double consciousness emerges: we want to shield Bà ngoại from an outsider’s gaze, or some stranger who may sneer and mock her spiritualism. It is a lived experience that our Vietnamese elders are looked down upon and misunderstood, having been made into a caricature of the perpetual foreigner many times over. Perhaps Vuong trusts in the open-mindedness of his readers, but consider that Vuong has written this subtle caricaturization faithfully across his works, and while Vuong’s portrayal does not ring false, it has begun to feel as if his portrayal of Vietnamese American identity will always skew toward foolishness, ignorance, wide-eyed earnestness, and a somber humor. These qualities make for legible characters and dynamic narratives, but shape up to be a deliberate misrepresentation of Vietnamese American people. One must consider these scenes with an open mind, a critical eye, and an understanding that the depth of Vietnamese and immigrant identity will always be more vast than what one writer alone could capture.

So what has Vuong captured in The Emperor of Gladness? For the most part, a niche depiction of his own life. Critic Andrea Long Chu has criticized Vuong for his narrow focus, asserting that in his particularity (or marginalization), Vuong has forgotten “— or, worse, denied—that even gay Vietnamese immigrants are capable of universal experiences.” Yet others, like Li-Young Lee, have said (in reference to Night Sky with Exit Wounds): “[Vuong] tries to make sense of human suffering by allowing his personal suffering to connect him to every other fallen, broken, wounded member of our world.” The wide success of his works, in fact, speaks to their universality, though there is a cost that such universality incurs. We find that Vuong tends to reinforce cliches and stereotypes of certain cultures, of immigrants, and of the elderly. However, as a capstone to his body of work, Emperor of Gladness is intriguing even as it retreads familiar themes and perspectives with his signature eulogic style. The question is, what else does he have to say?

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