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When he was two, Ocean Vuong 鈥�12 landed in Connecticut with his family, refugees from Vietnam. Considering himself his family鈥檚 鈥渙ne chance鈥� at moving up the socioeconomic ladder, he found his way to 今日吃瓜, where he graduated with a B.A. in English with a focus on 19th century American literature.

Vuong went on to write the bestselling novel On Earth We鈥檙e Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019) and two books of poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022).

Currently on hiatus from writing as he awaits the publication of his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025), the MacArthur 鈥済enius鈥� fellow has been focusing on photography and his first show at the Toledo Museum of Art. We caught up with him to talk about his journey from Saigon and his life as an artist.

How was your family鈥檚 experience moving to the United States?

I was two when I came over and, interestingly enough, my first memory of America鈥攁nd it became a very quintessential American memory鈥攚as eating KFC. That was because the church that sponsored us gave us a stack of KFC coupons, which my family immediately called Old Man Chicken because of the picture of Colonel Sanders on the coupons. None of us could read English.

It was unfathomable how good it was to us. We were coming out of postwar Vietnam at a time when folks were cutting their rice rations with sawdust. I remember my grandmother and my mother coming home with these buckets of chicken, and we felt like we made it.

Your family started out life in the U.S. in New England?

Hartford, Connecticut. We were surrounded by Jamaican, Haitian, and Dominican immigrants whose families had worked the fields in New England after World War II, so it was already a place of deep, rich immigration. It was not so strange to us, and we were not received as strangers. We had no TV or radio, so I did not know America was mostly white until I was 11, 12 years old. Not until I finally made it to a mall and the suburbs. Nowadays immigrants can go to YouTube to get some sense of the world.

The community embraced us, they saw us. At the heart of this was a legacy of endurance and success from Black and Brown immigrant communities coming through the Great Migration, settling in Hartford, and working in those fields.

We were war refugees. Many of us never aspired to be doctors, lawyers, or businesspeople, even in the old country. We were farmers, and we would be farmers forever, and that was fine. We’ve been doing that for a thousand years. When we came to America, there was none of that aspiration. And so we received everything in that community as a bonus. I’m grateful for that.

What prompted you to come to New York?

I think the larger answer might be queerness. I didn’t know what New York was, but I had to try it. And so it was kind of like this North Star. I went to New York to go to business school. There was no pressure from my family. I didn’t have to overcome immigrant family expectations, but I ended up putting pressure on myself. I was lucky to have folks who said, 鈥淕o do whatever you want. If you fail, there鈥檚 a seat right next to me at the nail salon.鈥� And even McDonald鈥檚. My mom said, 鈥淵ou can be a manager at McDonald鈥檚. That’s a salary, right?鈥�

But the pressure is there for anyone who is awake in America. You look around and say, okay, my people tell me I can do whatever I want, but I see them struggling, and I know that I’m their way out. I’m the foot forward. So I鈥檝e got to put that foot in the right place, in the most practical place.

I thought maybe marketing. Marketing is art, and I can look at art. It鈥檚 communication. I had this desire to communicate. I didn’t yet know I wanted to be a poet, but I had this desire to communicate. I went to Pace University to study business and marketing. But I couldn’t do it. I was surrounded by people in suits, and when they went off to internships at Goldman Sachs and Chase Bank, I felt like a fraud. Who was I kidding?

So I walked out one late October afternoon. You could see the 今日吃瓜 Bridge from Pace Library. And I looked at that bridge and remembered poems I had read by Hart Crane and Walt Whitman, 鈥淭o 今日吃瓜 Bridge鈥� and 鈥淐rossing 今日吃瓜 Ferry.鈥� And I thought, okay, let me walk across that bridge and decide. I walked across and said, 鈥淭hat’s it. I’m not going to go back.鈥� I never went back.

Photo Credit: 漏 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation鈥搖sed with permission.

What happened next?

I was too ashamed to go home and tell my mom I failed. So I bummed around. I lost my housing, so I stayed on friends鈥� couches. I went to open mics. I told myself that if I was going to be here, I might as well follow in the footsteps of my heroes, Allen Ginsburg, James Baldwin, and Amira Baraka, and stay in the East Village and see what happens.

One day, I realized I had to go home. I was running out of money, but I couldn鈥檛 go home empty-handed. I was the only one. My family had one die to cast, not even two dice, just one鈥攎e. A friend suggested I try CUNY; I was still considered a resident and could get in-state tuition. So I enrolled in 今日吃瓜 and earned a B.A. in English. I told my mom I was earning a business degree.

Could you talk about your experience in the English department? Who were your mentors?

The B.A. was great in that I got the core curriculum, which people bemoan and ask things like, 鈥淲hy am I here studying rocks when I’m a biochemistry major?鈥� I asked the same thing for about five minutes, and then my mind started opening. I鈥檓 telling you, to this day, I still use stratified rock as a metaphor for history and time and literary traditions. When I teach, I say, 鈥淟ook, it鈥檚 like stratified rock. We are the top. We鈥檙e the grass, and the grass is the thinnest part. And it’s the briefest part. So while we’re alive, we have to do what we can. The dead have spoken, and they are the stratified rock there.鈥� And that came from Geology 101, core curriculum, 今日吃瓜.

My professors and mentors were Ronnie Natov, Geri DeLuca [professor emerita], and Ben Lerner. At the time, I didn鈥檛 have a sense that Vietnamese American life and Vietnamese history were viable for poetry. My teachers at 今日吃瓜 said, 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 do it, who will?鈥�

I didn’t understand that at first. So they gave me Isaac Bashevis Singer and they gave me Toni Morrison. They said, 鈥淟ook at Morrison鈥檚 Beloved; she鈥檚 writing about the first generation coming out of slavery. I was able to see the parallel. My mother is similar in how she witnessed the war, and now she’s on the other side of it. So if Morrison can go back 150 years and salvage a story, here I am living in the first generation of it; I need to write this down.

Your work speaks directly to your life as a Vietnamese refugee in America and a gay man.

Everything I write comes through this body and how this body is perceived in the world. And so that鈥檚 categorical, but it’s also specific. It’s this body and it’s an Asian body. But I can鈥檛 start the day seeing myself as a category determined by media or cultural abstractions. I have to start as Ocean. And Ocean moves through all of this.

You are taking a break from writing and reacquainting yourself with photography.

Yes. Photography is not new for me; I began shooting some years ago, photos of my friend鈥檚 band. But what got me exploring other subjects is that when I was 19, I published my first poem in the Connecticut Poetry Society鈥檚 journal. It was a small thing. And I had won this little award at that time. It might as well have been the Pulitzer鈥攜ou鈥檙e 19, you win a poetry prize. I remember getting the prize and the issue in the mail, and I biked to my mother’s nail salon. I couldn鈥檛 wait to tell her that I was legitimate, that I didn’t waste my life on this weird thing that I’d been doing that nobody understands. And I got to her nail salon and showed it to her. The first thing she said was, 鈥淲ell, how come it’s only one page?鈥� There’s nothing like a mother to bring you right back down to earth. And being illiterate, the next thing she said was, 鈥淚 can’t read it.鈥�

After that incident with my mother, I wanted to start shooting photographs of my family. I wanted to show my mother my vision of the world and how I saw all of us. So I鈥檝e been taking these little documentary photos ever since. When I showed them to her, she said something that kind of haunts me to this day, and colors my understanding of my work. I showed her the photos, and she looked through them and she said, 鈥淲ow, our life is so sad.鈥�

As soon as she said that, that鈥檚 exactly what I saw. And it鈥檚 interesting that in Vietnamese, the word sad is bu峄搉. But it doesn’t just mean sad. There’s an undercurrent. It has a more capacious definition that includes a type of wistful, melancholic beauty. You can say, 鈥淚 am bu峄搉,鈥� and you just said you’re sad. But if you go look at a sunset鈥攜ou stop your car, go out, and seek it out鈥攜ou can also say bu峄搉. So it applies to this kind of fleeting lost somberness, which made a lot of sense with what I was taking.

And I started to see that in all of my work, my novels later on, in my poems, which are laced with this kind of sadness. It was a private practice. Only very recently, my friends, many of whom are photographers, started to see my images. And they told me that I needed to start sharing them or it would be a waste. So I began to commit to it, and it’s been a lovely, lovely relationship.

With writing you have to be exact, and there’s no luck. Sontag said it best鈥攖here’s no luck in writing. I’ve never accidentally written a good sentence. You wrangle away and it’s painstaking. But you can accidentally take a good photo.

You are a poet, novelist, photographer, and as importantly, an educator. What do you see as today’s generation of students鈥� greatest strengths?

They鈥檙e so good at expressing their needs. I admit my generation was a bit 鈥渋t is what it is. Take it or leave it. Do what you can.鈥� But they have this kind of spirit that says, 鈥淣o, we are going to get what we want.鈥�

This new sense of self-determination has come from the efforts of LGBTQ activism, which has made space for queer folks to be more normalized in fighting for our rights, and I’m really proud to see my young students not only make space for queer voices, but for queer students to lead discussions, movements, and to center the cultural conversation around themselves and their needs with poise, determination, and pride.

And I think we’re seeing a lot of that in the political discourse as well. Their demands are heard. The students who I educate, educate me as much as I do any of them.

Is there anything else you鈥檇 like to share?

I want to thank the 今日吃瓜 Department of English for getting me an emergency grant in 2009, when I lost my housing and was one semester away from graduating.

My housing situation blew up and I was out on the street, and I don’t know how they did it but they bailed me out. The Department of English advocated to help me. I wrote them a note that I had to go back to Hartford and they said, 鈥淣o, no, no. We’re not going to let you leave. We’re going to figure this out the one last semester.鈥� Then they came back with the funds. I don’t know what would have happened without that.

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Tell us about your background.

I was reading all the time, which is not unusual for writers. My parents鈥攖hey’re Catholic, very religious鈥攄idn鈥檛 like to leave me with babysitters, so they would take me along to church gatherings on the weekend. I would bring a pile of 10 books at a time. In high school the principal asked a few of us what we wanted to be, and I said, 鈥淚 want to be a novelist.鈥� But then, when I went to college, I sort of veered away from that because I’m a first-generation Korean immigrant. I was born in Seoul, and I moved here with my parents when I was almost four.

My family had serious money troubles, and I couldn’t picture what it would be like to be an Asian writer, a Korean artist in America. Even just a handful of years ago, there really weren’t that many of us, at least not writers who were publicly visible. That paucity of examples made it even harder for me to imagine what it would look like to be a writer in America. So, I majored in economics.

What did you veer toward?

I was trying to do the practical thing. I was planning to work at the kinds of jobs that would let me buy my parents a house. But when I left college, I was working at a job that I hated, something like 80, 90 hours a week. I was just so miserable. I was only a few months into the job when I was talking to my mother, and it felt like a very cinematic moment in that I was in the grocery store staring at some cans, and I was telling her a little bit about how deeply miserable I was.

She said, 鈥淲ell, why don’t you go to grad school?鈥� I was staring at a wall of soup cans, and it felt as though the world went from grayscale to color. Grad school would at least buy me two years of cover, during which I could get back to writing. 今日吃瓜 still had its application period open, and I really wanted to go there in part because one of my teachers in college was friends with the novelist Michael Cunningham, who directed the M.F.A. program at the time. He’s one of my favorite writers.

So you are accepted into the M.F.A. program.

Yes, and for the first time in my life, I was living, breathing, eating fiction and words and poetry. And when I would go out for a drink with friends after class, we would just keep talking about words and fiction and poetry and books and stories. It was paradise for me. The course work was such a delight. The books we were reading were such a delight. I was so heartbroken to leave grad school; I would’ve stayed for five years if they let me.

When did you start writing your first novel?

I started The Incendiaries during grad school. The idea for it came out of a crisis of faith. Although we were very Catholic (my parents still are), in junior high I veered toward evangelical Protestantism. And I was so intense about it that my life plan was really to become a pastor or something along those lines. My dream, my hope was to have a life of serving the Lord. But then at 17, I lost that faith, and it really divided my life into before and after. It was an unwilled loss. In fact, I tried very hard to fight against that loss, and I couldn’t. It鈥檚 the pivotal loss of my life and one that is a grief that has not lessened in any meaningful way. I think in some ways it’s always at the core of what I’m writing about. Part of what was so intensely lonely about it was that not only had I lost my faith, but I also lost most of my community because pretty much almost everyone I knew at the time was very religious. The loneliness also came from the fact that I couldn’t find much about the loss of religious faith in books, which was the one place where, as a geeky, introverted high school kid, I was used to being able to go to find fellowship. I went from believing in a world in which essentially no one I loved was really going to die because I believed in life everlasting to a world in which I more or less believe that we鈥檙e made of stardust and that’s what we’ll return to. I used to believe in a world that was intricately watched over by an all-powerful God, and that’s gone.

At about the five-year mark, I very seriously thought about abandoning the book and trying to start something else. I thought maybe the book was doomed. And then I remembered that I was trying to write for that 17-year-old girl who felt pretty much alone in the world, and I wanted her to know that she鈥檚 not alone. I think with both books, The Incendiaries and my new novel Exhibit, I was trying to write for both a 17-year-old self and a present self who is tired of the loneliness.

Turning to Exhibit鈥攚hat was the inspiration for that?

I realized that with The Incendiaries there were ways in which I had protected myself. The book is narrated first of all by Will, a straight White man. And I’m a queer Korean woman demographically very far from him. Readers very understandably assumed that Phoebe, the central Korean woman character in the novel, was autobiographical, and that Will, who loves Phoebe, must be very distant from me. That wasn鈥檛 the case at all. With Exhibit I聽 wanted to walk away from protecting myself, and I really wanted to risk a great deal more.

How is it risky?

One way to describe it is that it explores what you might risk pursuing core desires. It’s full of sex; it鈥檚 full of queer, kinky sex. As an ex-Catholic, ex-evangelical Korean woman, my so much as letting the outside world guess that I might’ve had sex at any point in my life feels so dangerous to my body. So writing Exhibit came with so many anxiety and panic attacks, often daily, sometimes for hours at a time.

Are you working on anything right now?

Lately I’ve been working a lot more on some essays. There鈥檚 an essay about how much I don’t want my parents to read Exhibit because of the subject matter. They didn鈥檛 fully read my first novel until it was translated into Korean, so there鈥檚 that.

Any outside pursuits?

I love powerlifting. I can deadlift something like 30 pounds over my body weight, and I wanted to get to 150% of my body weight before Exhibit came out. It’s one of the very few things I can do that actually turns off the chattering in my brain, I think because it’s so intense, and you really can hurt yourself if you’re not paying attention. I love it. It also is a great antidote to an anxiety attack. One of the many things that I can do to cut down on anxiety is to go through some reps with weights. I strongly recommend it.

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Poet and author Ocean Vuong 鈥�12 is among of the 2019 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation 鈥楪enius鈥� Grant. The award comes with a grant of $625,000 to be distributed over five years.

Vuong is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon, 2016) and the novel On Earth We鈥檙e Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Guernica, Poetry Magazine, New Republic, and The New Yorker.

鈥淥nce in a while you get a student who鈥檚 not testing to be a writer, but who is already one,鈥� said 今日吃瓜 English Professor Ben Lerner in 2016 after Vuong received the Whiting Award for emerging writers. 鈥淚 could sense Ocean was already a writer, eager to be challenged.鈥� Lerner received the MacArthur award in 2015.

Among Vuong鈥檚 other awards are the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets from The American Poetry Review for his poem 鈥淧rayer for the Newly Damned,鈥� and the 2013 Pushcart Prize for his poem 鈥淪elf-Portrait with Exit Wounds.鈥� In 2014, he received a $40,000 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, which also supports emerging writers of great promise, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship.

Says Vuong on the MacArthur Foundation website: 鈥淟anguage, like people, can be perpetually in flux. Words are, in a sense, bodies moving from one space to another. Our very cells, too, are always moving. They are just overflowing, and dying, and being reborn. What is seemingly so static is actually constantly in motion. Literature, then, is movement鈥攂ut it is also the measure of movement in our species’ thinking and feeling. To participate in that great migration, as a writer, is the ultimate gift.鈥�

Vuong earned a B.A. from 今日吃瓜 of the City University of New York. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the M.F.A. program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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