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TIME OFF OPENER
I
N MARCH 2019, THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE PUB-
lication of Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous, he called his agent from the hallway
of a Hartford, Conn., hospital. “There’s no way I can
go on tour,” he said. “My mother has cancer. It’s over.”
The i rst time his mother Hong had gone to the emer-
gency room with terrible back pain, he wasn’t with her. The
hospital sent her home with an adhesive heat patch. Vuong,
who lives in Northampton, Mass., with his partner Peter,
went to see her and took her back to the ER; this time, doc-
tors ran tests and returned with a diagnosis: Stage IV breast
cancer. It was in her spine, the marrow of her bones.
“When she went herself, she got a heat pad. When
I came, with English, she went to the oncology ward,”
Vuong, 33, tells me. In his voice I hear pain, but no shock:
he and his mother experienced many similar moments after
arriving in the U.S. as refugees in 1990. “I thought, Here we
are again: I have to speak for you. I have to speak for your
pain. I have to verbalize your humanity. Because it’s not
a given. Which is the central problem with how we value
Asian American women.”
Even as a celebrated poet and author, Vuong knows he
can rely on the privilege of being seen and heard only in
certain settings. When he went to get his university ID at
UMass Amherst, where he teaches, a white woman asked
if he spoke English. “She could have looked in my i le and
seen that I’m an English professor,” he says, sounding al-
most amused. “But I’m not legible until my career makes
me legible. When I walk into an event, I am Ocean Vuong
doing a reading—I bypass some of the coded veils that
Asian Americans are made invisible by, but only in that
context. It’s an insulated privilege that doesn’t extend
to other Asian Americans... to people like my mother,
working in a nail salon.”
After his mother’s diagnosis, he says, “it all just fell
away”: the tour, the publicity, what the novel would
mean for his career. “Who’s Ocean Vuong? I don’t
know. Nobody knows, in the hospital ward. None of
the powerful sentences do anything when your mother
is dying a few feet away from you.”
That June, with his mother’s cancer temporarily
held at bay by hormone therapy, Vuong was able to
tour after all. On Earth was an instant New York Times
best seller. The writer Rebecca Solnit 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 Sep-
tember, her cancer had spread, and she was having trouble
breathing. She died on Nov. 2.
... stop writing
about your mother they said
but I can never take out
the rose it blooms back as my own
pink mouth...
Vuong worked on his new poetry
collection Time Is a Mother while
mourning, in a world consumed by the
advancing pandemic—“I was griev-
ing, the world was grieving, and the
only thing I really had was to go back
to poems.” The collection bears wit-
ness to love, loss, and trauma in a way
that may feel especially resonant to
readers right now; it reads as a search
for meaning and truth in a life remade
by grief. He tells me that it is the only
book he’s written that he is proud of,
because he compromised nothing. He
thinks that has something to do with
losing his mother.
“All the things I’d written, it was
all to try to take care of her. I went to
school for her, I worked for her—she
was the source,” he says. “When that
was taken away, I didn’t have any-
thing else to answer to. And so I i nally
wrote for myself.”VUONG WAS 2 when his family l ed
Vietnam; some of his earliest memo-
ries are from their back apartment
in a townhouse on Franklin Avenue
in Hartford. He can recall everything
about those rooms, the sounds and
the bodies that i lled them, the bed-
room he shared with six others. “We
had so little,” he says, “but I felt safe
back then, because I was always sur-
rounded by Vietnamese voices.”
He began learning English when he
went to kindergarten. In fourth grade,
he wrote his i rst 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.”... reader I’ve
plagiarized my life
to give you the best
of me...
Vuong tells me he became a writer
because he is “full of limitations.”
He proceeds to list them: he panics
easily ; he is dyslexic; he i nds‘It felt like
sorcery,
a portal to
another
world that
she didn’t
understand.’
OCEAN VUONGTime Of is reported by Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah