90 TIME April 11/April 18, 2022
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He isn’t new to grief—before his
mother died, he lost friends to the
opioid epidemic; he lost his uncle
to suicide; he lost his grandmother.
Writing about “the private deaths,”
as he calls them, is an extension of
the work he’s always done: consider-
ing the aftermath of trauma, war, dis-
placement, mass death. “As an Asian
American coming out of diasporas,
you know this: when you look at Viet-
namese conlicts, Korean conlicts,
you see a lot of corpses that look like
yourself,” he tells me. “The negotia-
tion with death as self-knowledge is
something a lot of Asian writers and
writers of color encounter. And so
grief might actually be the mode in
which I write—not all my poems are
mournful, but they’re haunted by the
inevitability of death, and so the ur-
gency and even the joys that come
out of them are through the knowl-
edge of our own end. On good days,
that’s also how I live,” he adds with
a small smile, “though sometimes I
forget that.”
“He’s willing to write about dif-
icult things with vulnerability, and
with attention to not only expressing
what a thing is—whether it’s grief or
loss or addiction or displacement—
but how it feels, and also what a way
forward can look like,” says author
Bryan Washington. “As a queer author
of color, I can speak to how diicult
that is to do, and how in many ways
there is incentive not to do that.”
The author Tommy Orange is
likewise an admirer. “The beauty
of what Ocean does with language
is what gets me irst,” he says, “the
marriage of his use of language
with the reckoning of an American
identity... the wisdom and
compassion in his work matches his
craft, and I think that’s rare.”
VUONG TELLS ME that he is proud of
this book because he wrote it freely,
expansively, honoring all his curi-
osities and ambitions. “There’s more
humor, more witticism. There are
more registers,” he says. “This book
is all of me—I’m fully here. That feels
kind of like a death in itself, as well as
a celebration... Have I stopped grow-
ing? Is this my plateau?”
But soon we’re talking about his
teaching, his writing practice, new
things he wants to try. He’s show-
ing me his favorite Japanese note-
book and explaining why he writes
by hand: “If you want to write a sen-
tence, you’ll arrive much faster with
a computer. With the hand, by the
time you get to the end of a sentence,
or maybe somewhere in the middle,
you ind yourself hovering—and now
there are detours; other ideas come to
you. Where else can you go? There’s
much more you can discover.” I sug-
gest that his growth probably hasn’t
plateaued if he’s still pushing, pursu-
ing new discoveries in every sentence,
and he nods: “That’s the hope.”
After he won the Whiting, he
thought: I’m going to buy my mother
a house. Though he can no longer
make a physical home for her, he’s al-
ways thinking about family, chosen
and otherwise, and what it means to
build a life around them. He tells methat he and Peter just bought a house
in Massachusetts , with room for a
crowd: “My brother can move in.
When he has kids, they can live there.
When my aunt gets old, she can live
there. Our friends—most of whom are
artists, queer folks of color—can come
and just recover.” It strikes me as a
kind of callback to the community
that let him couch-surf when he was
a broke young poet, but it’s clear he’s
thinking back further than that, to his
early childhood surrounded by family ,
including his mother, speaking in his
mother tongue. “I think I still hope
for that in some way,” he says. “What
do I want my family to look like?
What do I want to build in my life
with the resources I have? I’d like to
build places where people I love can
be comfortable and OK. This is what
my life has taught me.”Chung is the author of the memoir All
You Can Ever Know