54 pages • 1-hour read
The Emperor of Gladness
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, suicidal ideation, mental illness, and addiction.
Circumstantial Kinship and Found Family
The Emperor of Gladness revolves around an unlikely relationship between a 19-year-old man with a host of personal struggles and the 82-year-old woman with dementia who saves his life and invites him to serve as her live-in carer. Through this unique context, Vuong explores the nature and power of circumstantial kinship and found family.
Hai and Grazina’s relationship provides an example of circumstantial kinship transforming into a found family. They come into each other’s lives entirely by chance, with Grazina spotting Hai on the bridge just as he’s deciding to jump. Vuong emphasizes the element of active choice that characterizes their continued engagement—Grazina invites Hai into her home, and Hai accepts. Grazina asks him to stay on as her carer, and Hai accepts again. However, their respective circumstances influence these decisions, with Grazina and Hai each choosing to remain in the other’s life not out of a sense of kinship in the beginning, but out of necessity. Over time, this circumstantial kinship transforms into a deep, genuine connection, with each of them as the other’s most important relationship in that moment.
While Grazina and Hai’s relationship is a connection born out of circumstance, his connection to the employees at HomeMarket is a relationship maintained by circumstance. Even as Hai accepts the job at HomeMarket, he understands and is overwhelmed by the realization that he will find a community here—that community is inherent to a shared workplace. The sense of belonging Hai and the other HomeMarket employees share is based on a specific kind of kinship, born out of shared proximity, time spent together, and shared labor. These shared circumstances create familiarity, intimacy, belonging, and identity. For instance, Hai comes to know his fellow employees so intimately that he can tell them apart, sight unseen, by their scent alone. The HomeMarket crew survives traumatic experiences together, like Cookie’s overdose in the bathroom; supports each other in times of need, like when they help Wayne at the slaughterhouse; and shows support for each other’s dreams and aspirations, such as attending BJ’s wrestling performance. The circumstantial kinship found at HomeMarket is rooted entirely in the present—neither Hai nor the others know each other’s past in its entirety, but Vuong suggests that such knowledge isn’t required for connection of this kind.
Ultimately, both of these found families serve Hai and the other characters in the book far better than their respective biological families do. Hai cares for Grazina with dignity, respect, and affection in ways that her biological son doesn’t. In turn, Grazina becomes the first person with whom Hai shares his grief about Noah’s passing. They find true friendship with each other in a time in their lives when both feel isolated and alone. Similarly, the HomeMarket crew rallies around Sony when he is fired and accompanies him on a journey to find his father—a deeply personal endeavor that he shares with his work family. Just as Hai finds support and healing with Grazina, Sony is helped by the HomeMarket employees to finally grieve his father’s death. Vuong’s narrative highlights the power and strength of circumstantial kinship and found family and its power to provide a sense of community and healing from grief and loss.
Storytelling and Make-Believe as Tools for Survival
Throughout Vuong’s narrative, each of the central characters employs storytelling and make-believe across a variety of contexts to cope with their circumstances. Vuong explores these different circumstances and motivations to shed light on what he suggests is a universal human tendency to seek out stories and pretense as a means of coping with reality. For example, Sony’s penchant for civil war history provides him with a way to grapple with his relationship to his father. Maureen’s belief in numerous conspiracy theories gives her a sense of control in her life. BJ’s wrestling dreams allow her to imagine herself as a larger-than-life legend. In each of these instances, the characters’ respective choices of stories or pretense bring them comfort, reassurance, or a way to engage with the world and their place in it.
Hai’s relationship with Grazina allows him to use storytelling and make-believe as a way to help another person rather than to escape and self-protect, catalyzing his character growth. During Grazina’s episodes of heightened confusion and delusion, Hai adopts the persona of Sergeant Pepper, an American soldier, to join Grazina in her constructed reality and lead her back to the present. Hai’s indulgence in make-believe acts as a literal survival tactic in this context, helping to keep Grazina calm during an episode of dementia, rather than fearful and aggressive. With Grazina, Hai’s penchant for storytelling and make-believe draws them closer together and forms the beginnings of a found family—a stark contrast to the disconnect Hai’s lies about medical school create between himself and his mother.
Coming to love Grazina as a proxy maternal figure in his life allows Hai to grapple with the lies he’s told his mother and, ultimately, his own self-worth.
Hai reflects that he chose to lie to his mother because he didn’t want her to feel like she was a failure as an immigrant mother—a fear that speaks to the specific context of his experience. Having a son who was doing something useful with his life makes his mother intensely happy and proud, and Hai initially takes comfort in this. The lie only delays his inevitable need to embrace himself as inherently valuable and worthy just as he is, independent of his achievements or mistakes. As Hai’s arc progresses, he realizes that while his lie helps him avoid the pain of his mother’s disappointment, his guilt worsens each time he talks to her, creating distance between them rather than connection. Similarly, the fiction maintained by Sony and his mother that his father is still alive is rooted in their shared desire to save themselves pain. As with Hai’s situation, these lies and make-believe only delay Sony’s inevitable need to face his grief so he can move on and begin healing.
The Precarity of Working-Class Life
Vuong highlights his focus on the experience of the working class in the opening chapter, making a clear distinction between the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, and the otherwise affluent state. Vuong, who grew up in Connecticut himself and draws on this autobiographical experience for the story, uses the fictional East Gladness to explore the challenges of poverty and its associated struggles in the context of their relationship to affluence—often hidden away from first sight.
The setting of HomeMarket, a fast-casual chain restaurant with numerous franchises across the country, allows Vuong to highlight the individual struggles of the working-class employees within the infrastructure of the corporate entity that employs them. By providing the interiority, personal passions, and familial dynamics of the HomeMarket crew, Vuong illustrates how their shared labor creates a sense of both identity and belonging while simultaneously critiquing the systems of power and privilege that exploit their labor.
BJ’s overzealous pride in their particular franchise and the team working there stands in sharp contrast to the corporate mandate to fire one of her staff. BJ is a manager who truly cares about the quality of her work at HomeMarket, and this attitude influences the employees under her. For example, Sony regards her as his general and follows her every command with devotion. The employees feel competitive with Panetta, whom they view as pretentious and not as sincere as themselves. As a staff, they care for their customers, especially their regulars, making an effort to ensure they are well taken care of, and they feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in their work, particularly when they receive appreciation from a customer.
In portraying the HomeMarket crew’s efforts as deeply personal, he sheds light on the exploitative nature of big corporations—who remain largely faceless in the novel. This corporate prioritization of profit at any cost, Vuong argues, disproportionately affects the working class—those who perform the day-to-day labor. Vuong describes BJ and her crew working hard and well at HomeMarket, showing each of the employees contributing to their common goal. Despite their efforts, their jobs are never secure, as evidenced by Mr. Vogel’s announcement that BJ must fire one of her staff. Sincerity and good intentions go unrewarded in the face of the corporate bottom line, and Sony is eventually let go. By the end of the book, the narrator reveals that in five years, none of the original HomeMarket crew will remain with the franchise, noting that the restaurant will still exist with a new staff, positioning the workers as interchangeable cogs in a machine. Vuong juxtaposes the value of labor and the hard work put in by his working-class characters with the futility of their efforts in the face of a capitalist system of power that exploits the poor to reinforce the privilege of the wealthy.
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