How did a Vietnamese refugee come to write what many are hailing as the great American novel?
While he was an undergraduate, Ocean Vuong formed the habit of writing at night. During the day, he studied literature at Brooklyn College and worked in a cafe. At night, he stayed up writing poems. It wasn’t just the sense of isolation that comes from being the only one awake, when “you look out of the window and it’s completely dark and you’re at sea in this little ship”. It was more that writing in the off-hours relaxed his knack for self-criticism. “You get the last word of the day,” he says. “The editor in your head – the nagging, insecure, worrisome social editor – starts to retire. When that editor falls asleep, I get to do what I want. The cat’s out to play.”
The poems that came out of those night-time efforts were published in 2016 as Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the success of which still amazes the author – the book won a Whiting award that year, and in 2017 scooped both the Forward prize and the TS Eliot prize. Vuong, who is 30, was not from a background from which writers traditionally emerge. As a two-year-old, he had been brought to the US from Vietnam as a refugee and settled with his family in the working-class town of Hartford, Connecticut. No one in his family spoke English. When his father left, his mother got work in a nail salon, menial work for little reward and a quality of life that Vuong had no particular expectation of exceeding. If Night Sky tackled the absent father as myth, then his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, reckons with the mother and grandmother who raised him and it is the influence of these women – courageous, difficult, devastated by the ripple effect of the Vietnam war – that forms the spine of the novel and asks the central question: after trauma, how do we love?
A student on a prestigious writing programme said to Vuong: 'You’re so lucky – you’re gay and from war'
I wanted to say: these lives, of women, and even of poor white people – these lives are worthy of literature
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