Award-winning author Ocean Vuong presents The Emperor of Gladness at First Parish Church
Vuong: “I want a book that just holds people and allows them to transform internally”
PHOTO COURTESY OF PENGUIN PRESS
This article contains references to suicide and drug addiction.
Ocean Vuong
The Emperor of Gladness
First Parish Church, Cambridge
May 16, 2025
On May 16, 2025, author Ocean Vuong presented his latest novel The Emperor of Gladness at the First Parish Church. The host of the event was Harvard Book Store, and its moderator was Here & Now senior producer Emiko Tamagawa. Vuong is known for his New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and his critically acclaimed poetry collections, Time is a Mother and Night Sky With Exit Wounds. He has received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, the Whiting Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for his work. A Vietnamese refugee, Vuong grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and is currently a poetry professor in the MFA program at New York University.
The Emperor of Gladness centers around Hai, a suicidal 19-year-old college dropout from East Gladness, Connecticut, who attempts to jump off a bridge. Before he does, he encounters Grazina, an elderly woman with dementia who urges him to live. Afterward, the two develop a close relationship as Hai becomes her caretaker. The novel provides a close-up portrayal of working-class American life, navigating themes such as poverty, labor, and family.
Vuong began the event by reading a harrowing passage about the opioid epidemic’s toll on a community and Hai’s conversation with Marlin, a sex addict, at a rehab center. What motivated Vuong to select this passage was his experience growing up in a community that was hit by the onset of the epidemic in the 2000s. “Much of my childhood was kind of inundated by it,” he said.
The passage was incredibly vivid, as Vuong seamlessly wove in details of the destruction that drug addiction brought along with nostalgia for a time before the rise of digital technology. The passion and poignance of his reading, immersed the audience in Hai’s world, set in central Connecticut, 2009.
When Vuong read a humorous conversation about MSG between Hai and Marlin, he took on two distinct voices, which brought the characters’ personalities to life and elicited chuckles in the audience. Despite the passage’s dark and heavy beginning, Vuong effectively balanced it with humor at the end.
Vuong did not originally intend to become a writer. He grew up in a working class family — his mom was a nail salon worker and his stepdad a factory worker. However, he gradually came to understand that writing was a powerful tool for “tending to the human condition,” including the universal difficulties of death and illness. Although Vuong recognizes writing as a tool that can be weaponized, he prefers using writing “to understand people, particularly suffering, as best as [he] can.”
Vuong’s motivation to begin The Emperor of Gladness with Hai’s suicide attempt was the lack of discussion in media about people who ultimately do not die by suicide. “I always wondered, ‘What’s day two like for that person?’” Vuong said. He has personally been affected by suicide, losing two high school friends and a close uncle.
Vuong admitted that he still doesn’t have an exact answer to what keeps someone alive after a crisis. “We forget that we were supposed to die because there’s another person who is tying us back to the world because they need something,” he said. “And I feel like that’s often how I find these answers, even in my own life.”
Hai and Grazina’s relationship in The Emperor of Gladness is based on Vuong’s relationship with a friend’s grandmother, also named Grazina. He served as her caretaker for two and a half years when he was a college student in New York City. Vuong described his relationship with Grazina as “pivotal and foundational” because it was a “quintessential American story” — both were immigrants who came to the U.S. for better lives.
Despite their different generations and continents of origin, both were refugees who fled wars — Grazina fled World War II, and Vuong fled the Vietnam War. “These supposed racial, cultural differences just compacted into necessity,” Vuong said. “All those things dissolved because we were so contingent on each other.”
Other relationships central to the novel include the ones that Hai forms with his crew members at the fast food restaurant HomeMarket. Hai’s experiences are based on Vuong’s own work at fast food restaurants. Vuong believes that American values place a lot of emphasis on the “nuclear family,” but not enough on “circumstantial family” — in particular, the “family of labor.”
Although Vuong and his fast food coworkers shared significantly different beliefs, he realized that the intense labor and the “kinetic kinship” caused these ideological differences to vanish. Vuong became vulnerable, sharing the hardships he remembered from his experiences, ranging from his coworkers crying after a difficult shift to the physically taxing work just to earn a living wage.
The mundane, repetitive work in fast food restaurants inspired Vuong to write a novel in which “nothing changes” because he views the majority of American life to be “static, even at its best.” A static life is often perceived as a negative thing because of the lack of progress and meaning, yet Vuong argues that most people in history are simply “stuck” and cannot get out, whether from laborious jobs or unhappy marriages. “I want a book that just holds people and allows them to transform internally, without giving them the cop out of structural change,” he said. In the novel, Hai undergoes this transformation through the relationships he cultivates with Grazina and the sense of family he finds at HomeMarket.
Vuong concluded the talk by circling back to his thoughts on being a writer, noting that he never saw his job as a “burden” because he was given the choice to be a writer, whereas his entire family worked labor-intensive jobs to make ends meet. “I’ve always felt that if I chose to be a writer, I had to choose to look at the world — the ugly and the beautiful I have,” he said.
To Vuong, being a writer is a “tremendous privilege” because he can make multiple revisions without any consequences, while his mom and stepdad cannot afford to make mistakes in their work. “So many people in our culture do not get to fix our errors,” he said. “I get to sit and dream and try.”