Ocean Vuong, Writer: At the heart of it, being a novelist is just being interested in people.

You have to, I think, be at the altar of the possibility of humanity.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Coming up, I talk with award-winning author Ocean Vuong about his works, including his latest book, "The Emperor of Gladness."

That's "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference" Stay tuned.

(Music) Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Franklin: Hello and welcome to "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference."

I'm Marcia Franklin.

My guest today originally wanted to become a Buddhist monk.

But one of Ocean Vuong's school counselors encouraged him to go to college.

There, he fell in love with the art of writing, and in short order became a bestselling author and professor of modern poetry at New York University.

He was also the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur fellowship.

At only 37, he's already published four books, including: "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," winner of the American Book Award; "Night Sky with Exit Wounds," winner of the T.S.

Eliot Prize; "Time is a Mother," a book of poetry; and his most recent work, "The Emperor of Gladness," which debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Vuong came to the United States in 1990 from Vietnam as a refugee, and was raised in Hartford, Connecticut by his mother, who owned a nail salon.

Much of his work is an homage to her and other working-class members of his family and community.

And as you will hear, his Buddhist beliefs also provide a strong foundation for his philosophy of writing and life.

I spoke with Mr.

Vuong at the 2025 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, where we discussed the influences on his work, including photography.

Franklin: Well, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

You have been on such a whirlwind lately.

I know that you, you told your publisher that this would be your "slump" book or something like that, but it has been… Vuong: (Laughs.)

I try to warn them.

Franklin: …it has been anything but a slump.

I mean, it's an Oprah's Pick.

Uh, you've been all over the country.

What has the last couple months been like for you, Ocean?

Vuong: The surprising thing was that what I was writing about, which to me always feels niche, 'cause you're just in your own world -- food service work, immigrant lives, you know, cultural marginalization -- was actually deeply universal to so many Americans.

And so many Americans, I think, are just really hurting, and really understanding that so much of this country is about labor and how labor often amounts to very, very little, even when we're told it should amount to so much.

Franklin: So, with all of this excitement and buzz around you and meeting people and hearing their stories, and it resonating with them, how have you managed to stay grounded during this time?

Vuong: Well, I've always, as a Buddhist, I think it's important to separate the ego with the work.

You know, to me, I've always felt like making a book is like sending a raft downriver.

And whether people throw glitter on it or tomatoes, um, that's not part of you anymore.

You have to stay on the shore in order to make anything else.

And certainly to live your life, you know, you don't want to get trapped on the raft that you've made.

Then you're stuck.

And, and so, for me, making a book, the joy of making a book is the composition.

And then sending that down river is part of the cultural work.

Um, and wherever it lands, I think it's no longer in your hands.

Franklin: That's really interesting.

It's a, it's a good life lesson for everyone.

You know, we're here to discuss "The Emperor of Gladness," but I hope you don't mind; I would like to start by asking you about your photography.

Vuong: Mmm.

Franklin: I really enjoy, appreciate and resonate with your photographs... Vuong: Oh, that's so sweet.

Franklin: …of your family in the nail salon in the early 2000s, of your brother, who you've helped raise.

Vuong: Yeah.

Franklin: Talk about the bedrock of photography for you and how it helps inform what you do as a writer as well.

Vuong: Well, thank you so much for saying that.

It -- I was a photographer before I was a writer.

Um, I grew up in, you know, the punk scene, DIY scene in Connecticut, uh, skateboard culture.

And a lot of my friends had cameras, and they said, "Please take photos of us while we throw our bodies off of six flights of stairs."

And then when they became musicians, I just stood in the back, you know, rooms and took flash shots.

But when I started to look at the photos afterwards, I saw that something else was happening, something that's actually very similar to the poem.

That there was a mythology when plot and time was removed from the frame, and there was a kind of new meaning, new mystery, that the frame captured out of context.

And I didn't think much of it, but when I became a poet, I remember very clearly one day I was published in the Connecticut River Review, a local little magazine, and I won a little prize there, and I ran home to my mother's nail salon.

And like any, you know, 18-year-old, I said, "Ma, ma, I did it.

I didn't waste my life.

My name's in print."

Um, and I showed it to her.

She looked at it and she was very pleased.

But then very quickly, a pallor came over her face.

And silly me, in my moment of triumph, I forgot that she couldn't read.

And so, she looked at it and she said, "Well, I'm sure it's quite nice, son.

I wish, I only wish I know what it's saying."

And I realized that if I was going to be a poet and be a writer, I would have to live with this grief of not being legible to my family for the rest of my life.

And so I started to borrow my friend's camera, and I started to take photographs of our lives so that she could see the world that we lived in.

And, you know, the surprising thing was when I finally gave her a stack of prints, she said, "Gosh, I didn't know our life was so sad."

And, you know, she used the word "buồn" in Vietnamese.

And the word buồn is defined as sadness, but it's a little more than sadness.

It's also beauty, closer to the Japanese "mono no aware," which is the sadness of fleeting things.

And she in a way became the first critic to understand work that I didn't even know I was doing, which is trying to capture a kind of longing and yearning and a deep sadness of being alive, but also the joy of it, the beauty of being alive in my work.

And I think my mother was the first person to really understand that ethos, and it was photography that made my work legible to her.

Franklin: And do you incorporate the eye of a photographer when you write as well?

Kind of zooming in, zooming out, maybe?

Seeing details?

Vuong: A hundred percent.

That's such a great question, because I used photography not to be a photographer.

I never imagined that I would show the work.

But I was deeply interested in making strong photographs, strong compositions.

And for me, it was a procedural practice.

Um, the quest to make a strong photograph -- a well-composed, hyper-charged dynamism in the photo -- that quest allowed me to stay in the world longer and to look closely at the world, even if it's just a scene that I would typically take, you know, a rundown mill factory in New England.

The desire to take the strong photo made me look at that place in every angle -- going in, going out.

And the same goes with the people, photographing my mother and my brother.

I saw more of them than I ever would as a writer just using memory or cursory snapshots to build off of.

So, the practice of taking strong photographs, the art of photography, allowed me to see the world so that I could write in my literature in a more robust way.

So they're deeply intertwined, and no one has asked me that up to this point.

So thank you so much for allowing me to merge the symbiotic relationship between those two forms.

Franklin: Well, you're welcome.

I'm very moved by them.

They take me back to my childhood when I was, uh, deeply informed by the photographs of the Farm Security Administration and… Vuong: Oh, my gosh.

Walker Evans and… Franklin: Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and Agee and all of that.

As a nine-year-old, I would sit and page through those photos and think, "What happened to those people?

Where are they now?"

Vuong: Wow.

Franklin: Because for me, they were real people, right?

Vuong: Well, you know, the germinal work for me – and, and, and, you know, for folks who ask, "Where does your work come from?"

The simplest, clearest answer, the foundation of my work is the book, "Now We must Praise Famous Men..." Franklin: Yeah, I have… Vuong: …by James Agee and Walker Evans.

That book was so strange.

It was like, um, is it a novel?

Is it a poem?

But, images, photojournalism.

It was kind of like a re-, reinvention of the project launched by Herman Melville in "Moby Dick" and Walt Whitman in "Leaves of Grass."

What is this country?

Who are we?

But to do so with such a nebulous, strange, and eclectic and hybrid form and execution was something that deeply interests me.

And I think that book still haunts everything I do, because at the core of that book is a kind of interminable restlessness.

And I think to me, that is the truest American ethos, if there is one.

It's not static or a monolithic sense, a Mount Rushmore sense of the Great American Novel or the American Dream, but rather the granular, nebulous, unknowable, restlessness of the spirit.

And that book to this day, to me, still captures that.

Franklin: "The Emperor of Gladness" really snuck up on me, I have to say.

I am not the easiest reader, I have to admit.

Sometimes I can be impressed by prose in kind of an intellectual way.

Um, it's sometimes difficult to move me, though, with it.

Vuong: Mmm.

Franklin: And um, I will say that I was in tears at the end of this book.

Vuong: Wow.

Franklin: And I think it's because there's something in this book that will connect with almost anyone.

If you know somebody with dementia or have cared for them, as I have, it will, you will relate to that.

If you've been a fast-food worker, you'll relate to that.

If you've had an addiction issue, you will relate to that.

It was incredibly moving for me.

Vuong: Aw.

That's high praise coming from someone who's, who's read them all, I know.

Um, this is the America that I knew.

I grew up with these folks; you know, I grew up with all of these characters combined.

And I grew up with people who are ill, who are addicted, and these are just the most common people I know.

And to me, they are the center.

When I'm writing the book, I'm not writing about marginal people.

I don't consider myself a marginalized writer.

I am marginal according to the census as an Asian American; I'm just a small sliver in this country.

But when I'm writing, I'm filling, I'm literally filling the center of the page with these ideas and these people.

And I think it's the most normal thing I can do is to write about um, laborers, workers, and everyday Americans.

They're the most interesting thing to me, because it's not about getting out.

Many people don't get out.

Books are filled with people who have escaped their conditions, overthrown governments, um, made new lives for themselves.

But history itself is actually filled with people who are stuck.

People stuck in marriages they can't get out -- never wanted to be in.

Stuck in jobs, stuck in wars they never wanted to fight in.

And to me, that's much more interesting as a fictive project.

There's much more tension in people trying their best when they're stuck than being able to get out.

Franklin: Well, it's also about interconnection and helping each other… Vuong: Yeah, yeah.

Franklin: …through that "stuckness," I guess you might say.

Vuong: It's the greatest mystery.

Why do we do it, right?

Where do we get that?

And yet, life is worth living when we show up for each other, even though it doesn't benefit us materially.

And everything about the American myth tells us that we have to grab the opportunities.

The Machiavellian self-serving idea, YOLO: "You only live once."

"Carpe diem."

And yet again and again, you know, as an American, I've seen people who just tirelessly work to, to sacrifice for each other when it doesn't necessarily benefit them.

And that mystery is something that I'm so, so interested in as a writer.

Franklin: "The Emperor of Gladness" starts -- and I'm not ruining it for anybody to say, because it happens very early on -- it's a young man who is thinking that he will take his own life.

And he doesn't, because he notices somebody who needs his assistance, his help.

And he stops to help her.

And that expands into, uh, the relationship, the core relationship of this novel, which I know is based a little bit on your helping and taking care of your partner's grandmother.

Vuong: Yeah.

Franklin: Talk to me a little bit about why you started with a near-suicide.

I know that there's somebody very dear to you who did take their own life.

Vuong: Yeah.

Suicide is very close to my life.

I had two friends in high school who succumbed to it.

My uncle in 2012 took his own life.

And he's my uncle in context, but he's really like a brother.

I was 24, he was 28.

We came to this country together.

We were in the refugee camps together.

And I was always interested in this idea, uh, what does Day Two look like for someone who decides to live without hope, without methods, without answers?

What does Day Three, what does Day 20 look like?

And an interesting thing happens in that scene; I won't give too much away, but he, he doesn't, you know, necessarily choose life.

He just forgets to die.

He notices that a woman is losing her laundry on the shore, and out of this kneejerk, you know, muscle memory, he says, "Hey, excuse me, your laundry."

And then he's like, Oh."

Then she sees him and she's like, "Wait a minute.

What's happening?"

And so to me, it's often; it's not the grand reasons.

We often want the big reasons, both to live and to leave.

You know, my uncle, in his letter; he left a letter.

And there are many things of that letter that I won't reveal, but there's something that is I think is useful to mention, is that in his letter, he says, "I just had enough."

And often, we, we want the big, big cinematic answer.

Some big reason -- heartbreak, breakup, losing a job, losing sense of a will, losing meaning in life, losing faith.

But he just said, "I had enough."

It was almost like he was pushing away a second plate at a meal.

And what I realized was that, as someone who worked his whole life in factories and nail salons, uh, he was telling me that he was tired.

And fatigue, being ground down, burnout is often -- and also ambivalence -- ambivalence is often a legitimate reason to, to, to, to think about leaving this place.

And so for me, I wanted that character to also, you know, just have an ambivalent reason.

He realized that he's more useful to her than he ever was to his own life.

And that, however, strange and small that reason is, to me is still a very legitimate reason to live.

Franklin: It's a very, very poignant relationship.

And I've, I've heard you say that long before you even became a writer, you were interested in, in human suffering and why there is so much human suffering and had even thought about being a monk at one point.

Vuong: I did.

I was 18; I wanted to go to this university called the University of the West to study to become a Buddhist monk.

And at that time, the university was not accredited.

So when I told my guidance counselor this, he said, "It's a great idea, but I can't let you go.

My job is to push you towards having a degree that would serve you.

So why don't you go to a community college?"

So I went to the local community college, and that led me to literature.

And I realized that the work of literature, um, allows me to access the same thing that being a monk would have, which is to really understand why we suffer.

And, and the book, if nothing else, makes the ideas shareable.

It's a technology.

I see the book as a technology which makes the concerns that we're both talking about now shareable, to hopefully many people.

And it just starts the discussion in which they can take off and think about on their own life.

And the greatest gift to me, the greatest achievement of a writer, you know, forget about prizes.

All those things are silly because they come and they're awarded to the past.

A prize, as lovely as it is, is not an assessment of who you are in the present.

It's, it's awarded to the past, it's awarded to the archive.

So it's a very dubious idea to, to measure your self-worth to a prize.

To me, the greatest achievement of a book is to allow readers to get more of themselves reading your work.

And that's my only wish as an author, is for readers to just come away from my books with more of themselves, more of their own ideas and their own vexations, to complicate their own values.

And, and, what a, what a mercy that would be.

And exactly what happened to me as a reader.

Franklin: And I learned a new word, uh, researching for this interview.

I'm going to pronounce it incorrectly, I'm sure.

Kishōtenketsu.

Vuong: Yeah, kishōtenketsu.

Yeah.

It's a Japanese form that actually comes out of Chinese poetry.

So, uh, it's a four-part system rather than the western three or five-part.

It's a system that uses proximity rather than conflict-driven plot systems to tell the story.

The stories that I wanted to tell couldn't work in those plots, because it would see characters as tools, as functionaries.

They would have to serve the tyrannical system of plot, and if they didn't, they would have to be spat out.

And their only scenes were scenes that serve or, or move the story along -- this sort of workshop-y term.

But the kishōtenketsu allowed the detour to happen.

Franklin: So you incorporated that in, in this novel Vuong: Yeah.

Franklin: …in having the proximity of characters be the story, not plot-driven conflict.

Vuong: Yes.

Because history is already tense.

Place is already tense.

You don't have to put conflict onto place.

It's already there.

And when -- I write about New England.

And so, you ask, "Well, what is New England?"

You have to talk about Native American genocide, settler colonialism.

You have to talk about the 20th century immigration from Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico to come work on the farms when the labor force was off fighting Hitler in World War II.

And so to me, um, history itself is enough tension.

And having characters insert or insist on their own histories and having them talk to each other -- in this case, a Lithuanian, uh, Jewish woman fleeing Stalin, embracing Catholicism, living in a ramshackle home, um, talking to a Vietnamese refugee from another war, another continent, a conflict 30 years apart, is to me a quintessential American story.

Forget about white picket fence or "Pull yourself from your bootstraps."

It's two people from two different timelines talking about war, brought together by war and trying to make a ramshackle American life.

That to me is the American story.

It's not so much the American Dream, but it's about Americans WHO dream.

Now, the diverse or eclectic possibilities are in the same room, and that to me is enough tension to tell a story.

Franklin: So much of the book, while it has, there's a lot of pain and sadness in it, there's a lot of joy and humor in it with the relationships of the people in the fast-food, uh, restaurant working together.

And, uh, they all help each other.

Vuong: Yeah.

We talk about the nuclear family a lot in this country, or the alternative family or chosen family.

But there's something else, I think.

It's the circumstantial family of work.

The family that are cobbled together randomly for a shift, whether it's in an office, a dockyard, a coal mine, or a fast-food restaurant.

So much of that life is very, very intimate.

And I'm interested in, in the stories and the life that comes out of those spaces.

A lot of times we have different political views, different beliefs.

But when you see your coworker sweating through, you know, in front of the, the, the fry hopper; you see someone put their head under their sink to cool down -- because those places can go up to 110 degrees, right -- you start to realize that "I don't care what your political beliefs are, there's a human in front of me suffering.

And also I need her to get through this shift.

She needs me."

And that kinetic bond, I think, actually erodes ideological differences.

And the concern now is that with technology, with working from home, with automation, we are losing I think a foundational part of American life, which is kinetic, communal labor and how that actually breaks down our disparities.

If you walk into any McDonald's today at any, any local American town and you just talk to people, their lives looks exactly like the lives in this book.

In other words, they're just interesting.

I think that's it.

You know, everything else is craft.

But at the heart of it, being a novelist is just being interested in people.

If you could be interested in people, the rest is technique and craft.

You'll find your way.

But you have to, I think, be at the altar of the possibility of humanity.

I'm interested more in resonance, and I believe that a work of literature, when it's really strong, it stains you.

So much of the write, the conversation around writing workshop is about "snagging people," "capturing a reader," "grabbing them by the throat," which is an odd way to think about reading.

Um, but I'm more interested in can we actually, um, unsettle a reader or stain a reader to the point where it's not about grabbing them.

But can the work stay with them weeks after they've finished it, days after, years later?

I don't believe it's a writer's job to capture and possess people, but rather to leave something in the reader that they can keep in their own life.

Franklin: Everything about this book has a filmic quality to it.

I, on the one hand, would love to see actors represent some of these characters.

On the other hand, I like keeping them in my mind the way they are.

Vuong: Mmm.

Franklin: What's your sense about whether this could become a film or whether you… Vuong: Um, I, I, I, I usually shy away from that.

You know, I told the people who do that work for me, I said, "Just please hold off."

You know, maybe I'm old fashioned about this, but I like a book to just have its own life.

And if its life is interesting enough and a director comes along and is saying, "God, I can add to this," um, I'd be happy for them to do that.

But for the time being, a book should just have its role as literature and just have its own terms.

'Cause the option will be there.

It won't go away if the book is interesting.

Um, just, just guard the book's life for a while.

Just let it be a book.

Let a novel live as a novel.

And because when a reader sees a novel has been optioned before a book is even out, or as soon as a book is out, they feel like they're doing catch-up.

It's like, "Oh gosh, the culture is going to swoop in and turn this into something else."

And, they, they lose, I think they lose their sense of participation in the, the art and the ethos of the novel in itself.

And so to me, I'm holding that off for now.

I've not – I don't swear it off.

'Cause I like other collaborating with other artists and stuff, but for now, I'd like the book to just be a novel.

Franklin: We are in some, uh, very difficult times right now… Vuong: Yeah.

Franklin: …as a country, as a world, as a landscape.

How do you see literature helping us… Vuong: Mmm.

Franklin: …right now?

Vuong: We have never had the absolute privilege as writers to write in a time of ultimate peace and utopia.

Um, and, and so to me, the, the work has always been tough.

Every writer before me has written while something was on fire, both metaphorically and literally.

And so, this is no different.

And so to me, it has always been vexed.

And it, we owe it to ourselves to really look, take a long, hard look at our times and try our best to give language to it.

Uh, this is the task.

This is what I've signed up for, and the work is to look and then look deeper and not look away.

And I feel deeply, deeply privileged to be able to do that.

Franklin: Well, thank you for spending this time with me and our viewers.

I really appreciate it.

Vuong: Thank you, Marcia.

Thank you.

Deep pleasure.

Franklin: You've been listening to writer and professor Ocean Vuong.

Our conversation was taped at the 2025 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to the organizers of that wonderful event for all their help and for inviting us back once again.

We've been conducting interviews at the conference since 2005.

If you'd like to watch any of the more than 80 conversations, you can stream them for free on the Idaho Public Television YouTube page.

For Idaho Public Television, I'm Marcia Franklin.

Thanks for tuning in.

(Music) Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.