Ocean Vuong: “I was grieving, the world was grieving, and the only thing I really had was to go back to poems”
recalls a rapt crowd at an event they did together. “Afterward, a young Asian American woman said to me, ‘Until Ocean, no one was telling our story.’ He knew what the audience needed.”When Vuong was interviewed by Seth Meyers, his mother watched from home, calling him in tears afterward because he’d spoken in Vietnamese at the end. But by September, her cancer had spread, and she was having trouble breathing. She died on Nov. 2.
He began learning English when he went to kindergarten. In fourth grade, he wrote his first poem, which he was accused of plagiarizing—his teacher didn’t believe he could have written it. But after that, he noticed, the teacher began to pay attention to him, occasionally helping him type his assignments on the school computer. “I learned that putting the DNA of my mind on paper had garnered this white man’s respect,” he recalls. “I felt incredibly dangerous and powerful.
“It felt like sorcery, a portal to another world—to success, power—that she didn’t understand,” he says. “She didn’t ask me about it, but she was like, OK, good: Do this, read your books, forever. As long as you’re sustaining yourself. You’re the first to be able to do this.”When she attended his readings, she would never look at him; she would position her chair so that she could watch the audience watching her son.
“He’s willing to write about difficult things with vulnerability, and with attention to not only expressing what a thing is—whether it’s grief or loss or addiction or displacement—but how it feels, and also what a way forward can look like,” says
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