89paperwork and “the minutiae of life”
challenging; he struggled with drug
addiction. He believes some of these
are responses to trauma, lived and
inherited. Another “limitation”? “I
can’t fake it,” he laughs. That’s why
he left the international marketing
program at Pace University in New
York City, where he had enrolled in
the hope of earning money to help
his mother—“a position so many
immigrant children are in—we defer
our dreams to do the practical thing.”
He dropped out once he realized
that he was learning “how to lie for
corporations.” “If my heart isn’t in
something, I can’t do it, you know?
Maybe that’s why I don’t have many
drafts—by the time I get to the blank
page, my heart is already there. That’s
a limitation, in a way, but that’s also
how I got here.”
Ashamed to return home empty-
handed, Vuong worked in a café, slept
on friends’ couches, spent his free
hours at the New York Public Library,
and enrolled at Brooklyn College to
study literature. Poems presented at
open-mic nights found their way into
early chapbooks. He landed presti-
gious fellowships and earned an MFA
at New York University; published a
critically acclaimed poetry collection,Night Sky With Exit Wounds; won a
Whiting Award and a MacArthur “ge-
nius” grant. Vuong calls his career
“serendipitous at every turn,” but it’s
also clear that there were many points
when he could have given up on his
writing and didn’t.
His work could sometimes be “a
touchy subject” with his family, who
couldn’t fully grasp his life as a poet.
He suspects that his mother, who was
illiterate, didn’t try to read because
the struggle might make the distance
between herself and her son more ex-
plicit. But when he would visit her
and read—not his own poems, just a
magazine he’d brought with him—she
would tell everyone to hush: “Ocean’s
reading.”
“It felt like sorcery, a portal to an-
other world—to success, power—that
she didn’t understand,” he says. “She
didn’t ask me about it, but she was
like, OK, good: Do this, read your
books, forever. As long as you’re sus-
taining yourself. You’re the i rst to be
able to do this.”
When she attended his readings,
she would never look at him; shewould position her chair so that she
could watch the audience watching
her son. “She read them while I was
reading my work, and then she would
say, ‘I understand now. I don’t know
what you’re saying, but I can see how
their faces change when you speak. I
can feel how it’s landing in the world.’ ”
His voice takes on a hint of the won-
der his mother must have felt. “I real-
ized this is something she taught me.
As a woman of color, an Asian woman,
in the world, she taught me how to be
vigilant. How people’s faces, posture,
tone, could be read. She taught me
how to make everything legible when
language was not.”VUONG BEGAN WRITING the poem he
calls “the spine” of Time Is a Mother,
“Dear Rose,” after i nishing the third
draft of his novel, partly because it felt
important to him to return to poetry.
“I thought: What would happen if I
tried to rewrite the novel as a poem?
I’ve never believed that you write a
book and then you’re done. I’ve always
felt that our themes are inexhaustible,
and our work is to keep building archi-
tectures for these obsessions. Who’s
to say that one novel, or 35 poems in
Night Sky, could exhaust these big
questions about love, trauma, migra-
tion, American identity, American
grief, American history?”
A version of “Dear Rose”—his
mother’s name means pink or rose—
appeared in Harper’s in 2017, two
years before her death. In Time Is a
Mother, it lives again, with dif erent
opening lines:Let me begin again now
that you’re gone Ma
if you’re reading this then you
survived
your life into this one...At one point, I share that I also re-
cently lost my mother to cancer, and I
know it cannot be easy for him to talk
with me about this. He immediately
of ers his sympathy, noting that we are
both “immigrants in this new land of
grief.” To his mind, death is “the clos-
est thing we have to a universal,” and
so our love for those we’ve lost is also a
form of common ground.△
Vuong and his mother at Elizabeth Park
in Hartford, Conn., circa 1992COURTESY OCEAN VUONG