“The superpower of being young is that you’re the closest to being nothing — which is also the same as being very old.”
Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness is not a story of triumph. The 402-page novel, as a work of art, is a triumph, but Vuong permits his characters to not be more than they are — to be damned but still beautiful, and not bound by the reader’s expectation of transformation. They aren’t even obliged to overcome their battles; only to endure them, and simply survive.
Describing it himself as an “antithesis of… American prosperity and upward mobility,” Vuong’s novel is semi-autobiographical, echoing his own lived experiences working at a below-minimum wage fast-food job in Connecticut to provide for his first generation immigrant family. In conversation with Canadian journalist David Marchese, Vuong explained “I think as a culture, we always want this sort of grand arc. Rags to riches. Girl gets the guy, guy gets the girl… I just wondered if I could write a book that didn’t have improvement arcs, because it also aligned with my observation of my communities.”
The novel opens with a more-than-poetic winding view of the misty, post-industrial town of East Gladness, each sentence more engulfing than the next, taking the reader on a journey across the post-industrial town they will soon come to know. Vuong is a master of words. With his roots in poetry, each description contains an insatiable amount of breath and depth, describing mornings in the fictional New England town as “the shade of oatmeal,” where “the rye across the tracks stumble[s]… toward the black spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth.”
It is after six pages of this lyrical, fog-drenched description when we are first introduced to the novel’s 19-year-old protagonist Hai, as he stands precariously atop a bridge in the pouring rain, and decides “like a good son, to jump.” It is not until he hears the berating voice of 82-year-old Grazina, telling him from the window of her riverbank house to “come back now! Jesus Mother Mary, not now,” that Hai climbs down.
This act of salvation foreshadows one of the most vital relationships explored in the novel: between lonely, lost, pill-addicted Hai, and the dementia ridden Lithuanian women, who Hai lovingly and unapologetically becomes the caretaker of. This relationship is reinforced by the similarities between Hai — who Grazina names ‘Labas’ after the Lithuanian world for ‘hello’ — and Grazina, as while Hai is “in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light,” and Grazina is reaching twilight, “the superpower of being young is that you’re the closest to being nothing — which is also the same as being very old.”
The most similarly significant narrative relationship that arises is between Hai and his crew of coworkers of the fast food joint HomeMarket — one of which being his previously estranged younger cousin, Sony. Through his own real life experiences, Vuong delves into the intimacies that build in instances of “circumstantial…labor, [the] arbitrary cobbling of strangers thrown together” where your “most valuable asset are your hands, not your personhood.”
Vuong’s anti-redemptive portrayal of perceived growth is crystallised through Hai. His story is captivating precisely because it resists traditional narrative expectations. For instance, it’s not an emotional whirlwind of internalised homophobia and ‘coming out’, though Hai is revealed as “liggabit’ (LGBTQ — as Grazina calls it) only in the final chapters, through fleeting memories of a boy named Noah and unfulfilled longing for a coworker.
It’s not about escaping, either; Hai briefly leaves East Gladness for New York, but returns full of grief and regret before the novel even begins. Nor is it a tale of recovery; Hai does check himself into the rehab facility ‘A New Hope’ once, but he buys an assortment of dilaudid pills the second he’s discharged. Hai isn’t rewarded with neat resolutions. The novel ends with Hai, high on pills, lying in a “half empty…Green Waste Management Dumpster,” while we’re offered glimpses of everyone’s future except his. His story, like so many real ones, simply is.
What I found so graceful about this novel were the glimpses of Vuong’s past work that may be picked up on as you read, turning his body of work into an anthology of echoes rather than standalone stories. For instance, the very opening lines of The Emperor of Gladness tells us “the hardest thing in the world is to only live once,” while ‘Immigrant Haibun’, a poem in his collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds informs its audience that “if you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.” This literary continuity builds a deeply immersive relationship between Vuong and his reader, wherein we are transported to his realm of intertextuality and emotional resonance no matter which novel or poem we chose to read.
The Emperor of Gladness left me in tears; it left me wanting more for a character whose purpose was not to have more, but to simply and wholeheartedly exist in the margins of Vuong’s fractured descriptions of East Gladness.
