Writers Who Inspire Us: The Courage and Gentle Conviction of Ocean Vuong
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“We often tell our students, “The future’s in your hands.” But I think the future is actually in your mouth.” - Ocean Vuong on The On Being Project
Ocean Vuong is an award-winning writer and poet who has garnered some of the highest literary praise for his work. To mention just a few: His poetry has been likened to that of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he has won a Whiting Award and a T.S Elliot Prize. His star was well and truly on the rise prior to his poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, being published in 2016. And yet, I wasn’t aware of this talented young writer until I found myself digging through my sister’s pile of books early into lockdown at the start of the year. Settling on Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, it didn’t take me long to fall deeply in love with his prose, and my introduction to his work came at the perfect time. I had not so much been in a reading rut, more so numbed to my earlier passion for literature that so strongly defined my early adulthood. I had known myself and the world through writing and literature for so long, and it was through Vuong’s tender yet compelling words that I was reacquainted with this passion once more.
Vuong’s two published works draw upon and reimagine his family history. He was born on a rice farm in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. When he was 2 years old, the family had to flee Vietnam after a police officer suspected that his mother was of mixed race heritage, which at the time would’ve meant she was working illegally under Vietnamese law. The family eventually arrived at a refugee camp in the Philippines before being granted asylum and migrating to Hartford, Connecticut in the United States. Vuong states that he was never good at school, and expected that he would follow his mother into work at a nail salon, but he was persuaded to enrol in the local community college, which changed the course of his life from the very first day. It was there that he fell in love with writing and developed a determination to become a poet himself.
Following community college, and an ill-fated 8-week attempt at Business School, Vuong found himself in the thick of the poetry scene in New York. He went to study 19th-century English Literature at Brooklyn College of the CIty University of New York, and later an M.F.A in poetry from New York University. Early into his M.F.A, he was notified that Copper Canyon Press was going to publish his first collection of poetry: Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
In both his poetry collection and novel, Vuong grapples with heavy themes such as the long-term side effects of war on his grandmother and mother, living in a loving maternal household yet having no father figure, carrying the weight of inter-generational expectations to live a better, prosperous life in America, the immigrant experience in the US, the forgotten victims of war, sexuality, and the war on drugs.
Vuong’s writing is a life-source in its deep exploration of humanity and its undying spirit, despite the atrocities that befall us, or the atrocities performed onto others. He is keenly invested in bearing witness to the immigrant experience and making Vietnamese faces and stories, like those of his mother and grandmother, seen, heard and acknowledged. As a result, both his poetry collection and novel are vulnerable, unflinching investigations into Vietnamese identity, perceptions of the culture and the Vietnam war in America.
Vuong’s exploration of these themes, inspired by his own life experiences, are certainly compelling. But what I love most about Vuong is his ability to exemplify how his craft - language, writing and poetry - can be the vehicles through which we can shape our world. Vuong is deeply invested in the juxtaposition between the powerful possibilities that language creates, yet it can also be our undoing.
“You have to articulate the world you want to live in first. We pride ourselves, as a country that’s very technologically advanced — we have strong, good sciences, good schools; very advanced weaponry, for sure — but I think we’re still very primitive in the way we use language and speak, particularly in how we celebrate ourselves.” - Ocean Vuong, THe On Being Project
These meditations are scattered frequently throughout Vuong’s work. In his essay ‘Re-imagining Masculinity’ he explores how toxic masculinity is inherited through a lexicon that excuses the human need for touch with ‘no homo’, and a lexicon that enables our very vanishing through supposed throw away expressions: ‘kill the lights’.
But for Vuong, the impact of language isn’t just a result of what is said, but what remains unsaid. In ‘The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes and Visible Desperation’, the most moving, heart shattering and important personal essays I have ever read, Vuong is critical of the imposed social structures that censor our language and ability to communicate our pain. He likens language, poetry and art to external extremities that, like fire escapes, acknowledge our capacity for disaster. Yet through them, we may have the only viable means for hope.
“What would a fire escape sound like if it was embedded into my daily language—and if I didn’t have to apologize for it? Could this be one reason we create art—one reason we make poems? To say the unsayable? I don’t know—but I’d like to think so.”
The world we want to live in, and the kind of world we want to encourage, is embodied in the words that we choose to use and share. With the arts being so mercifully scrutinised, scoffed at and neglected during this difficult year, Vuong’s work stands as an example of how important it is that these talents and industries are nurtured, so that we can continue to envisage and create a world that is worth living in.
Recommended Reading
Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016)
In his first full-length collection, Ocean Vuong aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. Courageous yet vulnerable, Vuong doesn’t allow these difficult themes to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, instead crafting a language of hope and a sense of wonder of the world.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son, Little Dog, to a mother who cannot read. The letter unearths a family's history that began before Little Dog was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.
Vuong adapts the narrative structure called kishōtenketsu, a form that refuses to deploy conflict as a means of progressing the story. What results is a deeply moving expression of the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son and a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
Reimagining Masculinity (2019)
In this essay, Vuong analyses the metaphors and hyperbolic figures of speech which are considered commonplace, yet upon closer inspection, have strong roots to America’s violent past. On this basis, he proposes that the idea of masculinity, or what many would consider to be ‘toxic masculinity’, is realised through the lexicon of violence and conquest.
The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes and Visible Desperation - 2014
A beautiful essay about how art can offer the means to share our pain, and to live. Through it, our most necessary conversations can occur.
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About
Carina Mancinone
Carina is a digital marketer by day and a freelance writer by night, based in Western Australia. Her penchant for stories and writing have been constant in her life and she believes they allow us the means to imagine endless possibilities as we find our way in the world. Carina is equally obsessed with cooking and one day aspires to line her walls, Nigella Lawson style, with cookbooks from around the world.
