Poet and author Ocean Vuong set his new book in the fictional Connecticut town of Gladness.
Born in Vietnam and raised in Hartford, he’s since become a nationally-recognized author, earning a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
His latest book, “The Emperor of Gladness,” explores the American dream. Voung says writing allows him to draw inspiration from family stories, without explicitly sharing them.
“I imagine almost a parallel-alternative universe, in which I can imbue that context with the imagination,” he said. “To me, the novel is the perfect form to allow yourself to be inspired by people, but not be the mouthpiece for their lives.”
Vuong spoke recently with Connecticut Public’s “Where We Live.” The following interview highlights have been edited and condensed.
On Connecticut’s wealthy reputation
I didn’t realize Connecticut had a reputation until I left it. I went to New York to go to school. When I said I came from Connecticut, everyone said, ‘Oh, how fancy.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’
They said, ‘well, it's full of mansions and private schools and yachts and golf clubs,’ and I just thought, ‘Gosh, when is that happening?’ It's not the Connecticut that I knew.
I thought, ‘Why is this so invisible?’ Why is my Hartford so different than Mark Twain's and Harry Beecher Stowe’s and Wallace Stevens’? How come no one has spoken about that in an honest way? And in a way that doesn't always just denigrate it? Because it's also a place people live and still live. My family still live there, actually. And it's a place where I also found my imagination.
On ‘poverty porn’ in Hartford
It was to my great dismay, a few years ago, when I was researching the history of Hartford, I stumbled on a YouTube video, which is now a subgenre of YouTube videos, of trauma porn – of poverty porn – wherein, people would drive with cameras on the dashboard through “blighted cities.”
It was to my dismay that I saw the neighborhood I grew up in in one of these videos. And there's, all of a sudden, there's thousands of people all over the world, commenting, ‘Look how horrible these people live.’
I thought that it's so interesting, because what I saw was life. I saw vibrant, beautiful life. And I just said, my only tool is language, and I have to use what I have to reposition this place as a place of possibility – because Hartford was also my greatest education of the larger riffs and potentials of American life.
On fast food and exploring the stories we tell in his new novel
Every single character here, in a way, is a novelist. They're telling different stories about their lives, and a lot of it is about deception, which is why fast food is also an undercurrent. Because so much of fast food is about deception and fantasy and facades – the front of the house and the back of the house.
I'm interested – what is the back of the house of the mind? What is the back of the house of the personality? What is the backstage of our day-to-day discourse? What does that look like? And it is interesting that sometimes we have to put on different characters and masks to really talk about the difficult things.
On the feelings stirred up when returning to Connecticut
My body and my senses always know it. When I land at Bradley International, and I step out of the airport, I can smell, I don't know, I can't define it, but I can smell Connecticut.
There's something deeply somatic about it. And then there's also personal memories that are less affirming.
It's a place with raw, brutal beauty, but I have a very idiosyncratic relationship to it, in that I have so many memories there, and not all of them good, and even when they're neutral, they're memories of people who are no longer here – family members and friends who you know are in prison or have perished.
So it's always very bittersweet. And the memories don't go away. Every street corner: the C-Town in Hartford, Mozzicatos, the bus station, where I met my father for the first time after he came out of prison in 2000 when I picked him up.
And so it's heavy. It's rich in that sense, in every sense of the word, both the positive and the negative.
But I think for me as a writer, it's my job. I can't turn away. I'm not saying every writer has to do this, but for me, that is the work I'm interested in. I'm interested in looking and observing closer and closer and trying to delay judgment. I think judgment is all over the world, all over the media. It's easy to come on one side or the other of judgment, but I like to look at all the angles and Hartford is a place of inexhaustible potential, when you look at it deeper and deeper.
Connecticut Public's Catherine Shen, Tess Terrible and Patrick Skahill contributed to this report.
