The Emperor of Gladness
The Emperor of Gladness
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Ocean Vuong on The Emperor of Gladness
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
The question nobody got to ask his uncleThe novel began with a death Vuong could not stop thinking about. In 2012, their uncle, twenty-eight years old and someone they describe as a big brother, died by suicide. What American culture offered afterward, Vuong noticed, was applause for the moment of rescue and then silence about everything that followed.
What happens on day two for the person who decides, thankfully, to turn away from ending their life? What happens on day three? Day four? I never got to ask that of my friends and my uncle. The next best thing for me was to ask it of my characters.
Vuong gave their protagonist Hai, the novel’s twenty-year-old central character, a turning point that conspicuously refuses the scale of a revelation. He doesn’t step back from the edge because meaning floods back in. He gets distracted by an old woman losing her laundry in the rain, and the moment simply passes.
He actually doesn’t really choose life. He just forgets to die. And I think what I want to say is that sometimes that’s enough. Whatever it takes. You don’t need the big reason. It’s just the little reason. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel is also the first book Vuong completed entirely after their mother’s death in November 2019, weeks after their debut novel published and shortly after she had moved into the house they bought for her with the advance. What they describe here is not a clean stage of mourning but something stranger: her voice colonizing their own thinking.
My mother’s language is now inside me. She left me her thinking. And I find myself thinking the way she did, even times when I disagree with her, when she was alive. ... I look at the world sometimes, looking at things, and I say, ‘Gosh, that’s what my mom thinks.’ Now I think that.
That absorbed inheritance runs through the novel’s emotional logic: people carry the dead forward not through memory alone but through the involuntary adoption of their perceptions.
How they wrote it
A slump book built like a damVuong told their editors from the outset that this would be their ‘slump book,’ a term borrowed from baseball for the release that follows peak performance and precedes the next real work. The phrase wasn’t self-deprecation. It was a structural commitment to writing without the promise of payoff, and it was possible only because of what they had already earned.
You have to earn your maneuvers; you have to earn your stubbornness.
For their first novel, Vuong used Kishōtenketsu, the Japanese four-part narrative form that builds tension through contrast and twist rather than through conflict and resolution. For this book they returned to the same structure but grafted something onto it, running an experiment about whether two narrative logics could share a spine.
I used Kishōtenketsu again, but this time attached the traditionally linear, outcome-oriented ‘hero’s journey’ to the end of it, as a kind of fulcrum—or perhaps as an addendum. I wanted to see if Western and Eastern narratologies could be synthesized in some way.
The dementia Vuong depicts in Grazyna, the elderly Lithuanian refugee Hai moves in with, draws on a year they spent at nineteen living with a real woman of the same name, also a refugee with frontal-lobe dementia, in exchange for a room while attending college in New York. The distinction they arrived at reframed every scene they wrote with her.
Often we think of [dementia] as a memory disease and we often say it’s a loss of memory, but from my experience, I think the loss of memory happens at the very end stage in life. But for the majority of the experience, it’s actually memory without choice. There is memory. There’s a lot of memory. It’s just not in this time. [paraphrased from audio]
That reframe is what determines how Hai learns to care for Grazyna: not by pulling her back to the present and correcting her, but by following wherever her memory lands.
Vuong drafts every book by hand, building pressure in notebooks over months before anything resembling a manuscript exists. The physical slowness of longhand is deliberate: it forces each sentence to cost something before the next one arrives.
When the notebooks are full, it’s almost like a dam that’s about to be breached. And you feel the crack, there’s enough water, and it’s time to open the dam.
The personal thread
Hartford, a stepfather, and two different dreamsWhen Vuong entered New York literary circles, they found a world organized by identity categories that bore little resemblance to the Hartford they grew up in. The first white people they knew as a child were Balkan refugees whose families carried traumas close to their own family’s. The novel’s widening of empathy toward Lithuanian refugees and the elderly reflects a deliberate effort to write past the boundaries the literary world had drawn for them.
Our relationships are more lasting than our ideologies.
Their stepfather worked twenty-five years at a Connecticut manufacturing plant, making a single screw for gas pumps and hanging his uniform each night with his Vietnamese name on the chest. Vuong watched that life and read it as stagnation. When asked whether he had lived his American life the way he wanted, the man said yes without hesitation. That collision of two completely sincere answers to the same life shaped the novel’s refusal to rank one kind of dreaming above another.
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.
On what the book is wrestling with
Kindness that changes nothing and everythingThe moral engine of the novel is not redemption or repair. Vuong was explicit in multiple interviews that no character gets a better job, no circumstance improves, no grand revelation arrives. What interested them was whether goodness could exist without any instrumental logic behind it at all.
I wanted to write about kindness without hope, where people know that kindness will make no significant change in their lives and yet they commit to it anyway. I knew that no character would get a better job or have a grand epiphany at the end of this book. They end exactly where they started, but they are transformed, internally, because of each other.
Vuong’s term for the relationships that form among Hai and his Boston Market coworkers is the ‘circumstantial family’: not the chosen family of deliberate liberal fiction, and not the biological one, but the family assembled by the accident of shared labor. The intimacy they describe is sensory and specific, accumulated in the body over the course of a shift.
Through labor, you know who’s coughing behind you. You know their gait and you know what they smell like three hours in, once the drugstore perfume fades away.
The novel is set in 2009, which Vuong calls ‘the height of supposed Obama hope,’ a year they spent watching an administration bail out corporations deemed too big to fail while their own generation absorbed the consequences. East Gladness, Connecticut, is their version of the Hartford they grew up in: working-class, immigrant-dense, and largely absent from literary depictions of New England. The question that sits beneath all of it remains one Vuong has carried since long before this book.
The desire underneath all this, that brings everything together is a central question in my life, trying to understand why there is so much suffering in our life as people, and yet why is there so much beauty? ... I don’t know the answer, but I’m always writing towards that.
What they want us to sit with
The little reason, the little kindnessVuong has said across multiple interviews that they deliberately resist making their working-class characters into symbols of either nobility or despair. The generosity they witnessed from their fast food colleagues, they told ABC Australia, did not come from suffering making people virtuous. It came from proximity: those colleagues were one paycheck from the exact situation of the people they helped, and that closeness made giving feel natural rather than heroic.
When the notebooks are full, it’s almost like a dam that’s about to be breached. And you feel the crack, there’s enough water, and it’s time to open the dam.
The novel keeps returning to the gap between what a life looks like from outside and what it feels like from within. Vuong watched their stepfather’s years at the plant and saw foreclosed possibility; their stepfather saw a life fully inhabited. That gap is not a problem the novel solves. It is the condition the novel asks readers to hold.
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.
Vuong’s final argument for the book, returned to in nearly every long interview, is that it asks readers to take seriously the smallest acts and the smallest reasons. Hai does not survive his worst moment because the world reveals itself to be worth surviving. He survives because an old woman drops her laundry, and the moment carries him forward. That, Vuong insists, is not a lesser form of salvation.
He actually doesn’t really choose life. He just forgets to die. And I think what I want to say is that sometimes that’s enough. Whatever it takes. You don’t need the big reason. It’s just the little reason. [paraphrased from audio]
The Emperor of Gladness asks whether we have been measuring the weight of kindness and survival by the wrong scale all along.