54 pages • 1-hour read
The Emperor of Gladness
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Symbols & Motifs
HomeMarket
HomeMarket, the fast-casual franchise where Hai works, provides an example of Circumstantial Kinship and Found Family. Hai comes to work at HomeMarket with his cousin’s help. When he is initially offered the job, Hai feels overwhelmed by the notion that HomeMarket is a place he can find community and belonging. Hai encounters this community at a time in his life when he both lacks and craves human connection and support. The HomeMarket crew offers him companionship without needing to interrogate him about his past—relationships based purely on their proximity and their shared work in the restaurant.
As the novel progresses, HomeMarket acts as a symbol of The Precarity of Working-Class Life. Despite its promises of selling its customers “homemade” food or the deep pride that BJ takes in the crew’s performance, Vuong ultimately positions the franchise as a cog in the corporate wheel. The illusion is initially shattered for Hai when he sees that the “fresh” food they serve their customers is the same, factory-processed dishes one finds at any other fast-food restaurant, an implicit critique of capitalist corporations that sell their customers a fabricated narrative to increase profit. The HomeMarket employees are treated as dispensable and replaceable, despite the hard work, pride, and ownership they take in their work, emphasizing the progressive disenfranchisement of an American working class by corporations who view them as resources in service of the wealthy and the powerful.
War
War is a recurring motif throughout the book, representing Storytelling and Make-Believe as Tools of Survival. Although no wars take place in the present timeline of the story, war provides the backdrop for both Grazina's and Sony’s family histories. Grazina is a Lithuanian war refugee whose family lived through World War II and came over to America to build a better life. Her episodes of dementia manifest as regressions to that time in her life. To help her through the episodes, Hai engages in pretend-play with her, taking on the persona of Sergeant Pepper, an American soldier who helps a young Grazina to safety. Although Hai did not live through it firsthand, the American War in Vietnam significantly impacted his own family and life, as his grandmother, mother, and aunt had to flee their home country and migrate to America. Hai’s cousin, Sony, is obsessed with the American Civil War, using a different war on a different continent in a different time to make sense of his own family background and his father’s history as a soldier.
Vuong uses war as a connective element across characters’ arcs: Hai’s persona of Sergeant Pepper helps him better relate to Grazina, while Sony’s research on the American Civil War helps him feel closer to his own father. This universality of war allows Vuong to explore how human beings across eras and cultures have always been capable of violence, destruction, and exploitation towards each other—an idea that Vuong reiterates through the symbolism of the pigs in the butchery, as well as the callous cruelty of big corporations towards their working-class employees. War, he suggests, is only one form of human violence and exploitation—butchery and oppressive socioeconomic systems of power are two others.
“The Emperor of Gladness”
The title of the book does not appear as a phrase by itself in the book, but it remains symbolically important, underscoring the themes and ideas Vuong explores in the novel. At first glance, the title suggests that individuals have autonomy and agency over their own lives and happiness, and can be their own “emperors” of gladness. However, in the context of Hai’s struggles with depression and mental illness, the title acts as an ironic play of words.
The word “Gladness” is a double-reference to both the fictional town in which the story is set, as well as the lack of “gladness” in Hai’s life due to his struggles with depression. The word “Emperor” references the incident at the slaughterhouse, where Hai learns about emperor hogs that were butchered for the emperor of Japan. The “Emperor” in the title becomes a metaphor for individuals who, like the pigs, are sacrificed to sustain those with more wealth and power, underscoring the sociopolitical critique inherent in Vuong’s exploration of the precarity of working-class life.
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