OCEAN VUONG IS A FRESH NEW ENTRY INTO THE LITERARY WORLD

Vietnamese poet Ocean Vuong

I have become fascinated by a diminutive, gay, young Vietnamese man with a voice and physical delicacy not dissimilar to that of the late Michael Jackson. Like Jackson, he stands to make a serious impact on the world -- not as an entertainer but as one of the great thinkers and communicators of the 21st Century.

Let me set the stage for this remarkable story.

For many immigrants, the best-case scenario is that their children will never really understand them. Think of a woman from Vietnam, the daughter of a farm girl and a nameless G.I., who moves from a refugee camp in the Philippines to public housing in Connecticut. There she raises a son, who was born on a rice farm but grows up in the back rooms of Hartford nail salons, and becomes not just the first person in the family to attend school past the sixth grade but a poet who wins prizes and is hailed in major magazines. The mother cannot speak English, or read any language; the more complex and ambitious the son’s work becomes, the greater the gulf between his writing in English and her basic Vietnamese -- and the more impossible it is for her to understand him, in return.

The young man we are talking about here is poet Ocean Vuong. He is 30 years old, and teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His début collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” was published in 2016, and made him just the second poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize for a first book. At the center of his work is the paradox of his situation: the grief and the freedom that accrue simultaneously as he writes his way toward and away from his forebears. In one poem, Vuong writes, “An American soldier (had sexual intercourse) with a Vietnamese farm girl. Thus my mother exists...Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.” In another, the lyrics of “White Christmas” -- the playing of which, on Armed Forces Radio, signalled the final military evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese refugees from Saigon -- are inter cut with images of death, abandonment, a sky “shredded / with gunfire,” helicopters “lifting the living just out of reach.”

Vuong couldn’t speak English when he started school in Hartford, and couldn’t read at grade level until age 11. But as he began to write poetry, in childhood, he wrenched himself into the existence that would separate him from his family even as he honored them. By “pressing this pen to paper, I was touching us back from extinction,” he writes. Language, for him, would be a conduit rather than an impediment. It would allow him to make visible the memory of his mother breaking a pencil as she wrote “a b c” over and over, trying to teach herself the alphabet, the “b bursting its belly as dark dust blows through a blue-lined sky,” nail-salon chemicals emanating from the sweat that seeps through her pink “I love NY” T-shirt. 

Vuong uses language to conjure wholeness from a situation that language has already broken, and will continue to break; loss and survival are always twinned.

He is conscious that, without his work, the story of his family would seem to exist mostly in the form of uninterpreted bodies moving from one place to the next. Several of the poems position animals as shadow selves. He recently published a novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (Penguin Press), featuring a narrator whose circumstances closely resemble, and are often indistinguishable from, his own.

I was particularly impressed with this very personable and entertaining young man in an interview with Seth Myers on his Late Night Show earlier this week when he spoke of "the lexicon of destruction" in the English language today. "In this culture we celebrate a young boy's success by saying things like "You killed it...You smashed em...You went into that game with guns blazing...You really blew em up"."What does it say of a culture when the measure of success for our boys is the lexicon of violence, death and destruction?" 

In another interview he spoke about language and understanding in history.

"A lot of our thinking comes from the Western canon, the Western canon comes from the Greeks and the Romans. And they are often celebrated as the forebears of democracy. But what is often overlooked is that they celebrate war. They were a belligerent and bellicose culture, as much as they had philosophy, arts, and science—they celebrated the warrior as the ideal of human beings and also the future. So their art and their stories, much of which frames our American imagination, is steeped in violence. 

"The protagonist always has to destroy something in order to find his worth in the world. If we read that, we think 'Do I have to destroy something to be a worthy human being?' Do I have to conquer? And oftentimes the answer is yes, even if it’s subliminally, in the American lexicon. We teach this particularly to our boys—this is where masculinity becomes toxic—it begins with the lexicon of death. We celebrate our boys through the language of destruction, and it’s no wonder they end up leading destructive lives."

He suggests that changing all that begins with understanding where we come from with our violent history, and also what we do with language. "Our language is violent. I understand that some of it is powerful, and it’s good to reclaim...-- I get it. It’s celebratory. But why must we see the language of death as the only way to celebrate our lives and living?"

I, for one, look forward to hearing much more from Ocean Vuong. He is different and he is refreshing.