YouSaid · the spoken record

Ocean Vuong

lines on the record: 57
first: 2025-05-13
most recent: 2025-05-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I think that's the most powerful thing about fiction is that you give yourself a second chance. You create a scenario where these characters can play it out for you. And Hay and his mother has this conversation that I wish I had with my mom, but I had no right to bring that on to her when she's taking her last breaths. Write fiction to create something that's shareable for people. And in a way, it's a fantasy. It's what I hoped I could say, but I didn't get to say it to the real person. And so I create a dreamland where everyone gets to say what they need to say.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's just yesterday when she was here, and then there's the today when she's not. I know there's been many years since. It's only one threshold. Mom and no mom. I was raised by a single mother. And, you know, when I was at her deathbed, I couldn't say what I wanted to say. As much as I just talked about how language makes more language, sometimes when you're kneeling at your mom's deathbed. She's hallucinating. You can't say the conversations. You have to meet them where they are. And I didn't get to say what I wanted to say to her. Is why I wrote that in the last page of this book. The last page of this book is what I wanted to say to my mother.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it's interesting she just started laughing. And we laugh because it's a relief of tension. And we all kind of start, that session just ended with everyone laughing. I don't know why these things happen, but language creates more language. And when we pay attention to it the way you've done your whole career, you open up these little chasms that woman said what she said. We met her where she was. And it was because this. Conversation”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all of a sudden, another woman down the aisle just started comforting her. And before you know it, everyone said, you know what, I feel the same way too, but there's other ways you don't have to feel that way. And then the person working on their nail, my mom's friend, said, well, I'm glad you're here because I wouldn't get to make your hands so beautiful. And all of a sudden, here we are in an afternoon in Connecticut surrounding a woman who maybe wish she wasn't born and trying to convince her that she should have been here. And then that revealed this kind of doubt in ourselves.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And talk about our moments that keep us up at night and to destigmatize vulnerability. And everyone in the nail salon just lit up and they were all in the same shared moment. And there was an incredible moment, another moment for me. There's these two moments that stuck with me in the nail salon where my mother was not working on this woman, but she was next to the same desk. And your show was talking about a strange family. Parents not be able to talk, something like that. We were all kind of rapped and chit-chatting and this woman getting her nail done. She stopped and she just says, Well, some days I wish I didn't have any parents. And everyone was just kind of like, what do we do? There was a moment to me as a child, it felt endless because I knew enough to think that's a crazy thing to say because that means you wouldn't be alive.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's important to destigmatize sadness and depression. I think if anyone's paying attention in the 21st century, they should be sad. It doesn't mean that they're condemned to sadness. And this is what your show did. When I was in the nail salon as an eight-year-old, what you see is a bunch of strangers come together and you talked about sadness. You talked about families falling apart. You talked about people surviving sexual assault on your show. And all of a sudden, these women, all of whom are strangers, now have permission to share their stories. And I suddenly I saw language, you know, because that's what your show was talking. Language suddenly became this permission for everyone to bypass the small talk, bypass talking about the weather or where I'm from the Patriots.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called Emperor Hogs not because they rule over anything but because they historically have been used to feed the emperor. And it's such a cruel part of naming. And so I hope that when readers get to that revelation, the title starts to change tone. And as a poet, I just love it when the same words start to get warped. I think ultimately that's what I'm interested in is warping what was once stable towards something much more malleable. It's not about making something concrete, but dissolving it towards the end of the book. That's my hope. And Emperor is a wonderful word that has multiple meanings in that sense.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But as you see it in the first chapter, gladness as a town doesn't exist. It's been renamed to MILSAP. And so to be the emperor of gladness is to be the emperor of nothing, of emptiness. And when the emperor hogs, naming is also a kind of warping of meaning.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give a nice buffet to the maggots, right? And it's a wonderful way. It sounds morbid, but it's actually a wonderful way to live life to say that all the petty arguments, for what? We're going to all end up in the same place. If we're lucky, we'll get a deathbed. We get to meet the people that raise us and supported us before we become food for maggots. And so the emperor, the ultimate emperor for Shakespeare, was the maggot. The smallest thing is the ruler of us all. But I like the title as a poet because there's always double meanings, right? So it feels very triumphant when you see it like in a bookstore. The Emperor of Gladness, I'm going to read it and feel all the good things.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very good, very good reader. The professor in me gives you an A. So there are many allusions to this. And it starts with the Hamlet quote, right? We fat all creatures else to fat us. We fat ourselves for maggots. And so it's a lovely quote because in that is this anxiety of the entropy scene. All our dreams and wishes for what?”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I wanted to parallel that as an allegory with how labor is in this country. People work day and a night out and they're just thrown to the wolves. And when their bodies break, as many of my relatives' bodies stop working, my mother's breast cancer, which ultimately killed her, was most likely breathing all the chemicals in factories and nail salons, you're just thrown out. And the slaughter of human beings, both in the opioid epidemic and the labor system. It's very parallel to the slaughter of animals, and I've learned that if we want to really know how brutal we can be as a species, we have to look at what we've done to animals. And that becomes the foreshadow of what we will do to each other.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“950. Okay. So it's $20 at the slaughterhouse in Connecticut. And I thought, you know, I didn't really, I thought in my head, in my 15-year-old head, it was like just packaging meat. Know, like, I thought, oh, yeah, just put it in a little tray, and then it goes off to the supermarket. And I followed these guys in the pickup truck one day. They drove us there. And it was my trial. I lasted just 30 minutes. I went in, I looked, I said, it was like war And I was so interested in that I think often we say. There's humanity, and then there's animalistic tendencies. But when I look at our history as a species, it's the humans that are the most animalistic. And the way that these hogs were butchered was so cruel, so bloody.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I worked on a tobacco farm illegally as a child. I got paid under the table. I was 15. It was for $9.50, which was back in 2002. It was a whole load of money. The minimum wage was $7.15. So you get $9.50 picking tobacco. It meant the world. But some of the workers there, they were all older. They said, hey, you want to come to this slaughterhouse, you make $20 an hour.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think I would learn a lot from Maureen. Because I feel like there's more to her, and I feel like I can get more out of her. You know, there's so much life there. There's so much hurt. And yet she's always around for everybody because she has nothing at home. You know, she lives in a kitchen to, you know, she's running out of money to heat her house. So she lives in a sleeping bag. Her son's died. And so she's very cranky, but that's just the facade to make it through the world as a woman.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't. I don't believe in that because Writer's block is in relation to productivity. Because then you have to ask, well, block according to whom? Block according to what measure of production. So for me, it's like if I can't write, which happens, I think. And that's productive. It's not about just creating quantifiable.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'll keep revealing something so idiosyncratic. And when I was writing that scene by hand, writing by scene by hand is really helpful for me because I stay in the scene longer. If I write on the computer, it gets too quick. I stay and I said, how she can respond to this question? I literally was like, come on, you know, and I'm in her world and she's leading me forward.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was all her, you know. I used to be really annoyed before I wrote a novel when authors say, oh, I don't know. The characters told me what to do. You know, I just follow them along. And I said, oh, come on, you wrote the whole thing. You know what it is. But when I started writing a novel, I think what happens is that you create a character and they give them parameters of things that they would or wouldn't do. And you have to be faithful to that and not betray that. And even though they'll say things and do things that I personally would never say and do, it's still true to them. And when those parameters are so narrow and they're so realized, you really sit down and say, what would they say? And they would only say that things, if you're faithful to those parameters, and sometimes you can force it and it gets creaky and bad, but if your faith...”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The day we want to live with dignity and respect for each other. In living in a small town forces you to do that. And it allows you dexterity with the language. You know how to talk about something without offending each other, right? So that you can see each other again at the laundromat because you will.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I felt like there's an incredible obligation that you have by offering each other dignity because there's nowhere to hide. You can be a jerk in New York and you just fade into the subway and then that's it. But there's no anonymity. You have to stand by what you believe. You have to defend and argue yourself. And then you have to face each other when you don't agree. You might have to work side by side. And so I wanted to see that that's actually not a place left behind. advantageous, even innovative way to relate to people when you cannot hide behind anything. You have to face each other with respect, dignity, and a kind of proximity that so much of America really is. If you talk to people, everybody kind of wants the same thing, even though we have vastly chaotic and disparate political beliefs at the end of the day.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was Yeah, yeah. It's right across the river, and a lot of people work in the field and then live in the city and vice versa. And I realize that when you live in a small town, in a small community, you owe respect to everybody because you can't be part of my French, an asshole. If you are, people know your name and they know your family and they know your grandmother.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in Hartford, and Hartford is interesting because you're in the middle of the city and it's the city that's often been forgotten. We often have a saying that all the good things are sucked up by Boston and New York. And so it is a place where when you come to it, the people there are the people who can't get out. They're what's left over. We have that mentality. In Hartford's interest, you drive 20 minutes and you'll be in a cornfield. You could be in the middle of skyscrapers, drive 20 minutes in any direction. You'll be in a smack dab in the cornfield. I was surprised.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The sentence is a linear technology. So it's a kind of a track. And what you do as an author is that you're asking a reader for their trust to say, just stay with me in this track because it's a big leap of faith. It's almost like when you're riding on a roller coaster, it's like it's one track. And as an author, you have to say, well, I'm going to let's just come with me and we're going to zoom in on something that people often drive past and don't think about. And so the book is a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate value systems, to different hierarchy of values. And let's just stay on these starlings and love this landscape because it's so brutal, because it's so fruitful to the communities that live it. And also, what is America? I was haunted by that. I don't know what next week is going to look like. But I know that this landscape in all of its...”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And no one knew where the country was going to be headed, who was going to head it. And I turn off all the radios and TV. I went to this cabin. I start writing by hand. And I spent nine pages writing about the towns and the Connecticut River Valley that sustained me that I grew up in because I wanted to really think like, what is my America? What is America? And I want to really sink in to the town as a character, as description. I wanted to really love it in all of its difficulty to just present it and not go on with a plot. So it started with space. It started with land and the history of land because land is tied to history. And at the end of the day, I think I write historical fiction, not in the sense of a period piece, but I write fiction that has history involved in it. And land is a part of history.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started with landscape. It started with the town. I write by hand. So I wrote this the day after the election in 2020. When the words also coming in, it was kind of chaotic. No one knew what was the results were. And I said, all right, I'm going to rent a room. I live in western Massachusetts. I'm going to rent a little cabin and just go away. Can I come back? Hopefully we'll know what's happening But it got more and more convoluted, as you remember from that election.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One life, you should try to make it better for other people. Children just have that. It's not a question to them. But as you get older, we start to be more fearful of that because we think that if I believe in goodness too much, then I've fallen for something. I've been duped, I've been stymied into believing goodness. And sometimes it's really hard. There are days where I can't do it. But that's my North Star, and that's why I started the book with that North Star. Is that the hardest thing is to live only once. So make it count and make it count for others as well.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that one phrase could have double meaning. You can approach it, that if you only have one life, what if you didn't just grab everything you can in the candy store, leaving it a total catastrophe in your wake? But what if you did it so that other people can also inhabit that space and you can improve it? Our culture often thinks that's silly, that's childish, right? It's too wholesome and earnest. But I think earnestness is an incredible courageous thing. I respect it immensely in the people I meet and the students I have. If you're earnest and sincere, it's the most greatest truth because it means that you're willing to risk vulnerability and ridicule. You're willing to be wrong and come off silly because you believe in everything. I think it's okay to believe in everything. It's okay to believe that if you have this”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in a sense, you know, the idea of YOLO, you only live once. Has been really destructive to our world. You know, corporations think they only have one life to harvest the most profit out of the environment and therefore harm the environment. You know, we're told again and again, no regrets, just seize the day. And it's very self-centered in a way. But I think another way to think about you only live once is what if you only have one chance to live with care, consideration, a sense of obligation to each other. And it's not even like this goody woo-woo selflessness, but it actually makes your life much better when you live with the obligation that you owe each other everything, both strangers and family and your environment and your community. And so I wanted to just change the meaning of YOLO and as a poet.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when they get together, you realize there are actually a lot of common ground. When people have been pushed to the center, I wanted to write a book where the people who were pushed to the absolute fringes of society get to occupy the center and the camera would just not pan away. I did not want to plot that solved them. I did not want anyone to get a better job, to have a better home. There's no improvement. It's just life and it's kindness without hope which is kindness at the highest cost. And yet we all know people every day who are kind and gracious and good to each other despite all of that. Kindness without any hope of return, that's just something I'm so fascinated.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And here we are two refugees from two different wars, two different continents, twenty years apart, and we are in Brooklyn, living probably the most American life I can think of. It's not the White Picket Fence American life, but it's still true. And that reciprocal care. I had to care for her if she took looked out for me. And I was so inspired by this because I think both the very young and the very old are on the margins of society. They're no longer in the center. The young are said, oh, you don't know enough. You don't have enough. You don't own enough to contribute. You don't have a degree. You don't have the credentials. In the old, you're defunct. You're out of the market. You're in the retirement. Push yourself away. And so both the young and the very old, in my observation in this country, live in a perennial loneliness.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You say Yeah, it's a long convoluted story, but Gejina is the grandmother of my partner. And when I was in college, I dropped out of business school. I lost my housing, lost my tuition, and I was casually dating my partner Peter. And he was in law school. And we were kids. And I said, I'm kind of homeless, but I want to go to school and study English, you know, and he said one day he called me as I talked to my mom. My grandma lives alone. She's very independent. She wants to stay in the house that she lived in after fleeing Stalin. fleeing World War II. She's a self-made person, a refugee like myself. And you can live with her and go to school. And so I lived with her for three years. And we had this incredible bond that then led to my partner and I's relationship blooming because it's this kind of strange, quintessential American family he would visit from school, but I would live with her every day.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's day two look like? What's day three look like? What's the aftermath of living and deciding to live and have the will to live without the hope of living? And I wanted to know that of my uncle because I didn't get that from him. So I think I write in order to understand that what if he got to have an aftermath where he's still alive? What would that life look like? That seemed like a much more interesting place to write a book from rather than to say, oh, well, they didn't do it. End of story. Everyone claps.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Won't and sometimes by choice, sometimes they have to stay and take care of elders who are How do I make do without escape? Becomes an existential question. How do I make do in this body if I can't leave it? This book starts with a young man deciding to jump off a bridge. He stopped by an elderly widow doing laundry. And it's a personal. Crux for me because when I was a teenager, one of my best friends took his own life with a gun. He was 16. My uncle at 28 took his own life. And usually when we talk about suicide, it's usually like, oh, they struggled. But then they didn't do it. And that's triumphant. Great. Well, actually, what I'm more interested in is how do you live and go on in the aftermath of that decision? If you decide to end your life and then ultimately decide not to.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think at the heart of every writer, you have to really love the world, even when it's difficult to love. And I think description. Is autobiographical in that when you describe something, you're giving it a point of view, how you describe something, how you see something says a lot about yourself. And I think I saw all these people in my life. And I never heard anyone write about them. And I said, if the sentence can pin life to the page, I want to pin these people who never got to get out. You know, we fetish these heroes' journey about Getting out of this town. And it's a very cathartic one. We love these stories. We want to feel like everyone can get out. But the majority of people can't.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a lot better than me. I get one draft at life and I usually mess it up, but High got 12 drafts. A little more refined.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As an author, I'm just really interested in human beings. That's it. Everything else is craft. You can learn that. You'll find a way to get that. But what you can't learn is a deep investment in compassionate watching and listening of our species.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was a younger writer, I thought you had to fill the page or else nothing happens. But the more I work at this, the more I realize that writing is about listening to the world. You're collaborating with the world. You don't shut it away and go into your little desk or your cave and create genius work. It doesn't work like that. Ultimately, nobody writes a good sentence by accident. It comes with care. You have to really care for the world and every author's book is multiple drafts. It means it comes out of tireless care, obsession, worry. And when you hold up anyone's book, you're getting their best self. And the best self for me comes from really engaging with the world without judgment and really being interested in people. At the end of the day, all I would say is that”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know why. I still think about that, and I don't understand it, but I just knew that I was receiving something really intimate.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think there's something about labor. There's enough anonymity. He knows that when we clock out at 6 p.m. I'll never see him until the next shift. I don't know where he lives. I don't know his sons. And there's something really unique about modern life and maybe all of life where that kind of laborious intimacy allows us to say things we won't even say to our priests, our loved ones, our family, our best friends because there's no judgment.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he says, you know, there's no true connection I have with Jake. There's no reason for this. And the others do good by me. I do good by them. But I'm coming to realize it's such a strange thing that I only love one of them. Do you ever feel that? And I said, I don't know.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then next hour later, we're cleaning out the freezer. And there's something that's so peculiar with what I was talking about with circumstantial family. We have our backs to each other. I'm 19 years old. Cleaning the freezer. We're talking about family. We're talking about, oh, you have a brother, what have you? And to this day, I'm haunted by what happened because he's talking about his sons. And he just says something. He says, you know, I can't tell my wife this. And I thought, oh my God, you know, like, am I going to hear a crime of God or a crime of the law? He says, I have three sons. But I only love one of them. I'm 19. I don't know what to say other than give an affirmative kind of like, you know, like I just don't know what it meant.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a wild moment. In my time at Boston Market, that I was still, I think it's been almost 20 years and it's still in my head, and it'll probably be in my head until I die. I didn't put it in the book because it's too dramatic. Sometimes as an author, he said, life is more dramatic than fiction can allow. It would be too pressurized. But I was being trained early on by this man named Reuben. He was in his 50s and he was training me. And the first thing he taught me was how to eat a Spanish croissant in under 30 seconds. He says, if you're hungry, you don't have to take a break. You can slip two croissants in your apron and then you can go into the freezer because nobody goes into the freezer. You know, you can't go into the bathroom because a customer might see you. That's really odd, see someone eating a croissant.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And what is it Kindness without hope when you don't have hope that the kindness will drastically change anyone's life and yet you still give it, that has always fascinated me, even as a child, you know, we are a culture that fetishizes talent, athletic talent, musical talent, writing talent. But I wonder what would happen if we had prodigies of kindness, if we can celebrate children when we tap into this innate kindness. And I saw that at the home market, at the Boston markets, at the Panera breads, where people are always, when there's so little they can do to affect change, they still go out of their way. They don't get paid extra. They don't get anything extra. And yet it's the moments after the shifts, having the cigarettes, after being slammed, people being diagnosed with cancer in the middle of the shifts, getting on the phone calls.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I hope I changed it just enough not to have to hire a lawyer. But I worked there for two years. I worked at Panera Bread as well. And what I found was that It's easy to be kind when you have so much to give, when you have so much means, you have so much wealth. It's easy to give when your life doesn't change, when you can give so much. And it's a beautiful thing.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaningful. I was trying to learn how to be a writer. Everyone said, you have to change, you have to improve And meanwhile, American life, as I saw it, wasn't improving, but it doesn't mean that these people didn't have lives full of dignity.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same homes for 20 30 years. Some of them don't get raises. Some of them don't move up. And yet, their lives are not worthless. It's not like their lives are not.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what I was a fiction student, we were told going back to Aristotle that the greatest work of fiction usually has a reversal of fate. You have to change at the end to bring the audience a kind of catharsis, rags to riches. He gets the girl, the girl gets the guy. You're going to find the body. You'll find the murderer. So it works in a very commercial way that there's a promise of catharsis. There's a kind of deliverable. And it works in the same way when you buy a car or a home or a washing machine. And I thought, and yet, American life, as I saw it growing up as an immigrant in this country, didn't work like that. My aunt works a FedEx for almost 40 years. My brother works at Dicksport and Goods for 15 years. The people who I love, they work the same jobs. They drive the same car.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, America has often been founded on the idea The nuclear family And one antidote to that might be the found family. But I actually think when we look at the history of our culture, it's the circumstantial family founded around labor. And so when I worked at Boston Market as a teenager, I found that it was actually the relationships that you had with people you don't choose, people who are cobbled together working through a shift, and you start to know their footsteps. You start to feel the cologne they wear, the gum, and when that gum will expire. You even hear how they cough, how they talk, and the intimacy that comes from the circumstantial labor cobbled together is actually the foundation of so much of our country. So much of it is founded on labor, loneliness, and love in the midst of all that.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't be afraid of not knowing. You owe it to yourself to go to the root of the mystery. And that is to work not only a pedagogy and education, but also of life. It goes beyond books.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When my mother knew I was a nerd. And we came up in Vietnam as rice farmers. Yeah. I was the first to go to college, the first to read. And we've been rice farmers very happily for hundreds of years. It was the war that ejected us from that idyllic world into this one. And so by geopolitical violence and accident, I'm now a professor in a way. She knew that in this country the sentence will be the medium. Can make us change and change our lives. She didn't understand it, but she knew it was powerful. So she would drop me off before her shift at the nail salon. She said, You go in there. And you read everything. Especially what you don't understand. And it's so interesting because that's what I give my students now. You have to move towards the unknown, the mystery, the condition of not knowing is the first step of knowledge.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't know if anyone has talked about that, but I think that was the major byproduct that your show did is that it made working class people who don't have access to centers of knowledge. They don't get to be in a classroom and have high philosophy around craft or what have you. They get to participate in the vehicle of culture and you make culture legible to them who often don't have that chance. So I just want to say thank you so much for that. Oh my god. Now I'm going to buy. Well, I think your mother.”
2025-05-13 · The Oprah Podcast · Ocean Vuong: "The Emperor Of Gladness" | Oprah's Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT