JULY AUGUST 2019 32
profile OCEAN VUONG
RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is a
contributing editor of Poets & Writers
Magazine.
B
ORN in Saigon in 1988 to a
family of rice farmers, Ocean
Vuong was only two when his
extended family left Vietnam
and traveled to Connecticut after mak-
ing a brief stop in the Philippines. The
seven-member household included
his grandmother, “who would start
to sing any time there was conflict,”
Vuong says. “Since she was the elder,
it cast a kind of spell over us so that
we could survive our problems.” The
cultural adjustment for this mostly il-
literate refugee family was not easy, to
say the least. Vuong’s father returned
to Vietnam not long after their ar-
rival, and his mother found a job as a
manicurist, a profession she still prac-
tices. “Everything was erupting all the
time,” Vuong recalls, “but it was our
shared journey that kept us together.”
Though the Vuongs were the only
Vietnamese family in a mostly Black
and Puerto Rican neighborhood,
they were embraced with generos-
ity and kindness, which made them
more comfortable with the reality that
they now lived in a different country.
“I didn’t know that most of America
was white until I was eight or nine,” he
says. The concept of white supremacy
was encountered much later, when he
eventually left the working-class side of
Hartford to seek job opportunities as
an adolescent in the more affluent and
commercial areas of the city.
In the meantime, he was having
to contend with two life-changing
realizations: that he was gay and that
he had, despite a love of reading, dys-
lexia. The learning disorder is a family
affliction; Vuong’s mother and brother
also have it. Much later he would find
out that so did Octavia Butler and F.
Scott Fitzgerald, which helped him rec-
oncile with the possibility of becom-
ing a writer. “I would insist it’s not a
setback or an illness,” he says. “It’s just
a different angle of looking at language
that actually reveals a lot and was very
advantageous for me as an artist.”
Vuong says he also sees his queer-
ness as a source of strength in the way
he thinks about the world. “For queer
kids, when the world around you is
dangerous, you go into your own ref-
uge,” Vuong says. For him it was books.
Coming out to his mother, however, was
a different kind of challenge—one that
he didn’t think would end well for him.
In fact he was prepared for the worst
and planned his exile from his family.
“I waited until I was seventeen,” he
recalls. “I had enough for a bus ticket
and $2,000 in my pocket saved up
from my job at Panera Bread. I had my
bag with me when I sat down with my
mother. I was ready for rejection.” But
that rejection never came. At this point
the family had already suffered serious
losses to drug overdoses, victims of
the opioid epidemic that was affecting
this working-class community, a harsh
reality he weaves into his new novel.
“Where would you go?” his mother
asked. “What would we do without
you?”
Relieved, Vuong set down his bag and
began to imagine a future in Hartford
the way his family had so many years
ago. His mother suggested he try col-
lege first because her son “had a belly
full of English.” And if not, she sug-
gested, “You can always come work at
the nail salon.” Vuong jokingly adds, “I
thought, ‘Well, it’s not a bad job. Where
else can you work and watch Oprah all
day?’”
His time at Manchester Community
College was brief but instrumental in
changing his perceptions about who
had the right to dream big. “I was for-
tunate to walk into my first class, a com-
position course, and be met by single
mothers, people with two jobs, people
in their forties—all walks of life—and it
felt like for the first time I saw a teacher
have faith in this community of outsid-
ers, investing in our imaginations, and
challenging us,” he says. “Folks that
were not supposed to be having these
discussions were allowed to.” By now
he had started to keep a journal, feeling
