Ocean Vuong finds beauty and companionship in a fast-food shift

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Before Ocean Vuong became the notable name in literature he is today, he worked a typical 9-to-5 at a fast food restaurant.
It was there, among the hustle and bustle of serving customers from all walks of life, and his interactions with his co-workers, that Vuong found inspiration for his latest novel The Emperor of Gladness, which is a coming of age story about Hai, a 19-year-old fast food worker in America.
In the story, Hai forms a found family with his co-workers and an elderly woman. They're considered to be on the margins of society, but find comfort in each other through their shared sense of ostracization by the world around them, and their desire for companionship.
"My work is always interested in power dynamics ... in class dynamics and identity, all of these things that are discrete borders that either are real or imagined," said Vuong on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist and novelist. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam, raised in Hartford, Conn., and currently lives between Northampton, Mass. and New York City. His previous works include On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Time Is a Mother.
He joined Roach to discuss The Emperor of Gladness and the inspirations behind the characters' unexpected bonds.
I know that you have had experience working as a fast food server. Can you set the scene for us? What is it [like] to work in that kind of space where you're just grinding it out, trying to make a living and keep that roof over your head?
I worked at a place called Boston Market and Panera. It was a microcosm of America itself. We often talk about the nuclear family in the American values, and the antithesis of that might be the found family.
I think what we don't always talk about is the circumstantial family, the family wherein we are cobbled together in a shift at a workforce. The family that you have no choice in, and yet you must work together amongst these strangers to get through a shift.
I worked at a place called Boston Market and Panera. It was a microcosm of America itself.
You are heavily dependent on them, and my experience working in those places is one of the most insightful and tender moments of my life.
So much of America and modern life is actually made by these intimacies that the corporation doesn't really make room for, but people establish it in spite of that. That subversion is something that I'm really interested in.
It's fascinating because not only do you have people coming together in terms of it as a place of employment, [these] are also places that people come to you for comfort. Customers have these stories, and we see a little bit in your novel [about] what's going on in the lives of [them]. Are there customers that you remember from your days working in food service?
Absolutely, customers and coworkers. I think the customers are interesting because the corporation doesn't see them. They never see the individual — they see them as a number, as a cash flow.
The corporation also doesn't see the employee as beyond their function. We're kind of like a pair of hands. And yet, because we are human beings and not robots, we start to see the stories and the identities in our customers.
A lot of the customers that I had were sex workers on the highways in Connecticut that we worked on, and they would come in right before their shifts — very dangerous work, [and] you just watch a sex worker eat an entire rotisserie chicken with all of her nails on. It's just this symbol and vignette of beauty and perseverance. It's the oldest profession in our species, eating at a fast food restaurant to sustain herself, to raise her family. Also the people who work there — they're not supposed to say certain things beyond, 'Can I help you?' 'What can I get you?' 'I'm so, so sorry.'
I think the customers are interesting because the corporation doesn't see them. They never see the individual — they see them as a number, as a cash flow.
But they start to tell each other stories in the back, in the smoke breaks.There was one moment when I was 17 working at Boston Mark. I was cleaning this freezer with my mentor at the time, who was this man in his fifties. He was giving me all this advice about how to work efficiently, but then it would bleed into life advice.
He said, "You know, you're young now, but when you grow up, you're gonna start realizing some strange things. I wanna tell you something, it's something I haven't even told my wife." And he says to me, "I have three sons, but I only love one of them." I don't know what to say, I'm a child.
He said, "Yeah, I know, it sounds weird. Jake and I have no real bond, there's no reason for it, but that just happens. God chooses who we love. Even though we're supposed to love certain people, we don't always meet up to it."
There's so much about these circumstantial communities and families in this novel. We see it form in the workplace across generations and we see it formed between Hai and Grazina. [She's] a Lithuanian woman, she's in her 80s and she's living with dementia.
When she can't remember where she is or what's going on, she remembers her past living through the occupation of the Baltic states during the second world war. This is a different refugee story than the sort of refugee story you've told in your other work. What drew you to this particular refugee story?
The book at the end is dedicated to a woman named Georgina. She was a woman I lived with when I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, and I lost my housing, and a friend [was like] my grandmother's alone with dementia, let me talk to my mother, and maybe you can stay there, take care of her and have a home.
I ended up living there for three years, and on one hand, our geopolitical histories are very different, and yet it is absolutely the same. She had the same traumas that my grandmother had, she had the same night terrors, she was describing bombs in the same way my grandmother described them.
And here I am, a Vietnamese refugee living with a Lithuanian refugee from two different American wars, 30 years apart, two different continents and we're meeting in one rail house.
It was actually Zadie Smith, when I met her in 2014 in Paris. We were just sharing stories about how we came to writing and I was telling her the story, I was living with this woman who had dementia and I was making up stories to ameliorate her anxieties.
In a joking way, Zadie said, "If you don't write this novel, I will." I was like, "Oh my God, one of the greatest novelists of our time thinks this is worthwhile to tell, I should figure out a way to turn it into fiction and tell that story."
It's been seated in me for a long time, but it was an honour of this friendship that I end up having with this elderly woman who in many ways survives so much and was also just cast out of society.

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