The Emperor of Gladness

As the boy lifts himself over the railing, he spots another platform lower down that will break his fall, so he climbs down onto it. He hesitates as he prepares to jump, stunned when he sees what looks like a corpse floating on the water below him. The boy hears a voice calling him and spots an old woman doing her laundry on the riverbank; he realizes the “corpse” is a bedsheet.

As the old woman spots the boy, she commands him to climb to safety, dismissing the boy’s claims that he wasn’t going to jump. She orders him to come over to her house, threatening to call the police otherwise. Once inside, the woman gives the boy a cigarette and a towel to dry himself. She introduces herself as Grazina—a name that means “beautiful” in her native Lithuanian. When the boy reveals his name is Hai, she decides to call him “Labas,” which means “hello” in Lithuanian. Grazina gives Hai dinner rolls, encouraging him to crush them beneath his feet in a bid to get rid of his sorrows, and Hai briefly feels better. Grazina offers Hai her spare room to wait out the storm, which he accepts.

Hai wakes up the next morning and collects his jacket, which once belonged to his friend, Noah, whom Hai met when he was 14. Noah wasn’t his real name, but Hai started calling him that the week after Noah died. Hai mentions to Grazina that he heard her singing “Silent Night” in the middle of the night, but she confusedly refutes this. She also feeds him carrots, claiming they “prevent you from getting the blues” (22).

After learning that Hai doesn’t have any family except for his mother, from whom he’s currently estranged, Grazina asks Hai to live with her and be her helper. She is 82 and needs help taking some medication. She used to have a live-in nurse, but after the latter eloped out of the blue, Grazina hasn’t been able to get a replacement willing to take the position. Hai warily agrees because the accommodation would be free, but promises this will only be until he is back on his feet.

Hai and Grazina settle into a comfortable rhythm over the following weeks. Looking through her patient folder and the numerous medications Grazina is meant to take, Hai realizes she has mid-stage frontal lobe dementia. Sometimes, to test her awareness, Hai asks Grazina who the current president is, the way he used to with his late grandmother, who had schizophrenia. He’s satisfied when Grazina accurately responds, “Obama.” Hai does the grocery shopping and handles Grazina’s medications diligently, learning to navigate her occasional delusions and adjust the dose of medication accordingly. He also discovers Grazina’s late husband’s pain medication scattered throughout the house, which he secretly pockets.

One night, when a thunderstorm breaks out, Grazina wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. Hai tries to calm her down, but she believes she’s in Lithuania—her brother, Kristof, is stuck somewhere, and she urges Hai to free him. Hai sings an old Vietnamese folk song his grandmother used to sing to him, which eventually calms Grazina down and pulls her back to reality.

When Grazina learns that Hai used to want to be a writer, she reveals that her late husband dreamed of being a poet, but he never ended up writing anything, and eventually died of Alzheimer’s. Grazina also reveals that they are low on money, and Hai takes the hint, promising to find work and help out with expenses.

Hai heads into East Gladness, hoping to find work, armed with the baby carrots Grazina handed him before he left. He arrives at the HomeMarket in town, a franchised, fast-casual restaurant, and asks for his cousin, Sony, who works there. Hai has not seen Sony in two years after their respective mothers, who are sisters, had a falling out when Sony’s mother, Aunt Kim, moved to Florida instead of staying close to her sister after their mother died.

Hai is shocked to learn that Aunt Kim is in jail. Sony is living at a home that used to be a sober living centre, but now houses people like him who need help developing life skills. Having recently turned 18, he’s working at HomeMarket to save up bail money for his mother. Hai remembers how Sony, who was born with hydrocephalus, had to have emergency brain surgery after birth. A scar runs down the middle of his head—a remnant of the surgery for which Sony was mercilessly teased by other kids growing up. Due to Sony’s condition, his father abandoned Sony and his mother shortly after Sony’s birth and moved to Vermont, remarrying another woman.

Hai asks if Sony can help him get a job, and Sony promises to introduce Hai to his manager, BJ. Hai gives Grazina the news back home, and she says she’s confident that Hai will get the job.

Hai goes down to HomeMarket for his interview the next day, where he meets “Big Jean,” the Caribbean American manager whom everyone calls “BJ.” BJ gives Hai a tour of the space, including the kitchen and back office, discovering that the supposedly fresh food that HomeMarket serves is factory-made and processed elsewhere, presented to appear homemade and comforting. Hai also meets the other HomeMarket employees: Maureen, an older woman in her 50s who manages the orders at the counter; Wayne, a Black man who handles the chicken station; Russia, a young boy who is constantly smoking marijuana; and Amanda, a teenager who washes the dishes.

BJ is zealously proud of this particular HomeMarket franchise, claiming they take care of their customers and give them happiness by turning “food into feeling” (54). None of the other workers is as enthusiastic as BJ, except Sony, who is in awe of her. BJ claims their franchise is the third-best grossing location of all the HomeMarkets in the country and offers Hai a piece of the corn bread they sell, which is made with BJ’s secret recipe: “It was corn bread more corn-like than any corn (Hai had) ever tasted” (55).

BJ gives Hai the job on the spot, and Sony, who obsessively recites Civil War trivia, likens BJ to General McClellan and welcomes Hai as their newest private, claiming he is proud of Hai. Russia hands Hai a piece of chicken Wayne has just made, and Hai is moved to tears, overwhelmed both by the taste and the realization that he is part of a new community and has a fresh start. Sony trains Hai, and in the middle of the day, BJ calls Hai into her office. She plays him a soundtrack she has made herself, confiding in Hai her dream of becoming a wrestler; the soundtrack is music for her entrance into the ring.

Hai heads home at dusk, and Grazina is thrilled by the news of Hai’s new job and the corn bread he brings home. In return, she shows him to the basement of the house where her late husband’s collection of miscellaneous hoarded objects—from pots and pans to furniture—lies collected. Grazina has made a path through the mess and shows Hai her husband’s vast collection of books. Grazina tells an awed Hai how her daughter, Lina, also loved to read; however, her husband was always yelling at Lina to get back into the real world.

Grazina urges Hai to make use of the mess, and Hai picks out a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which he and Noah were supposed to read together the summer before Noah died. Over the next week, Hai stays up nights reading the book, often helping Grazina through her dreams, and feeling “something so close to mercy” (70).

By October, Hai falls into a rhythm with his job at HomeMarket and his life with Grazina. He gets to know his fellow employees intimately well, to the point that he can tell who is behind him solely by their scent. The days at HomeMarket are mostly the same, with some horrible customers peppered in between the usuals. One day, when a white man and his teenage sons make racist remarks about Wayne manning the rotisserie, Maureen stands up for him. After the irate customer leaves, BJ commiserates with Wayne.

One evening, Hai finds Sony doing sit-ups as preparation to join the Honor Guard. His mother’s appeal has been denied, which means Sony needs to bail her out, and he has heard the military pays well. Hai reflects on how he was born in Vietnam, 14 years after the end of the war that left the country in ruins. His family moved with him to Connecticut when he was just two, and he was raised by his mother, grandmother, and aunt. Hai had had a decent life, and even made it to college, the first of his family to do so. However, he had already been using pills for a while by then, and by Thanksgiving that first year, he had dropped out of Pace University in New York and was back on his mother’s couch.

After another fight with his mother about his substance use, a year after he dropped out of college, Hai impulsively told her that he had been accepted into an MD program at a university in Boston. Ecstatic and proud, Hai’s mother bid him goodbye five months later with copious amounts of home-cooked food. Instead of going to Boston, however, where no university was waiting for him, Hai checked into the New Hope Recovery Center to get sober.

Hai and his friends had turned to drugs when they were fairly young, with Hai only 16 the first time he tried heroin. With his state-issued health insurance covering three weeks at a rehabilitation center, he signs up for a program at New Hope. He calls his mother on the second day and lies about having reached university. His mother, in turn, urges him to pace himself with his studies so he doesn’t end up quitting again. A guilt-ridden Hai hangs up on her.

Hai’s time at New Hope is not as bad as he expected. He is diagnosed with clinical depression and put on slow-release medication, with withdrawal symptoms only hitting him hard on the first couple of nights. The nurses are good, well-meaning people, and what Hai struggles with the most is the boredom, which forces him to be with himself. In all the time he has to himself, Hai wonders why he lied to his mother about university. Each time, he's reminded of “the image of her face brightening when he told her he was going to heal the sick, the cancer-riddled, the broken, the maimed, by becoming a doctor” (97).

When Hai is closing up the store one night, a customer comes in at the very last minute. He reveals that he is a retired detective who can’t stop thinking about a case from seven years ago, when a young girl named Rachel Miotti died after being dragged out the passenger door of a car for miles. Hai promises to let the detective know if he hears anything about Rachel.

Later that night, Grazina wakes up disoriented again, calling for her brother. Unable to break her out of this mental state, Hai decides to join her in her reality. He pretends to be a soldier, “Sergeant Pepper,” who is helping Grazina out in the middle of World War II. Calling on what he remembers from war films and what he has heard from Sony about the American Civil War, Hai guides Grazina to the bathtub, which he convinces her is a jeep, and suggests that she take a nap while he, Sergeant Pepper, drives them to safety.

As Grazina sleeps, Hai breaks his 47-day sober streak and takes some of the pills he’s been hiding away, and slowly slips out of consciousness himself.