![]() Another “limitation”? “I can’t fake it,” he laughs. He believes some of these are responses to trauma, lived and inherited. 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 finds paperwork and “the minutiae of life” challenging he struggled with drug addiction. “I felt incredibly dangerous and powerful.” “I learned that putting the DNA of my mind on paper had garnered this white man’s respect,” he recalls. But after that, he noticed, the teacher began to pay attention to him, occasionally helping him type his assignments on the school computer. In fourth grade, he wrote his first poem, which he was accused of plagiarizing-his teacher didn’t believe he could have written it. He began learning English when he went to kindergarten. “We had so little,” he says, “but I felt safe back then, because I was always surrounded by Vietnamese voices.” He can recall everything about those rooms, the sounds and the bodies that filled them, the bedroom he shared with six others. Vuong was 2 when his family fled Vietnam some of his earliest memories are from their back apartment in a townhouse on Franklin Avenue in Hartford. ![]() “When that was taken away, I didn’t have anything else to answer to. ![]() I went to school for her, I worked for her-she was the source,” he says. “All the things I’d written, it was all to try to take care of her. He thinks that has something to do with losing his mother. He tells me that it is the only book he’s written that he is proud of, because he compromised nothing. Vuong worked on his new poetry collection Time Is a Motherwhile mourning, in a world consumed by the advancing pandemic-“I was grieving, the world was grieving, and the only thing I really had was to go back to poems.” The collection bears witness 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. But by September, her cancer had spread, and she was having trouble breathing. 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. It’s an insulated privilege that doesn’t extend to other Asian Americans … to people like my mother, working in a nail salon.” 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. “But I’m not legible until my career makes me legible. “She could have looked in my file and seen that I’m an English professor,” he says, sounding almost amused. When he went to get his university ID at UMass Amherst, where he teaches, a white woman asked if he spoke English. Which is the central problem with how we value Asian American women.”Įven as a celebrated poet and author, Vuong knows he can rely on the privilege of being seen and heard only in certain settings. “I thought, Here we are again: I have to speak for you. In his voice I hear pain, but no shock: he and his mother experienced many similar moments after arriving in the U.S. ![]() When I came, with English, she went to the oncology ward,” Vuong, 33, tells me. “When she went herself, she got a heat pad. ![]()
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