Ocean Vuong at work (c) John D & Catherine T MacArthur Foundation
Last year, I read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and was stunned by his poise: how he could write with astounding acuity and wisdom while bearing such weight of emotion. “There is poetry and there is the noveI,” I said at the time. “This book is both and neither. It is an ark for all that he has wondered at and those he has most cared for up to this point. Part memory, part reverie, but nothing like an autobiography.”
What a joy to discover Ocean was the latest guest on Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast. In a beautiful and tender conversation with the host, recorded at the On Air Fest in Brooklyn, he talked about how his heritage and family have informed his work. What really fascinated me was his perspective on language: how our careful choice of words can help us access one another’s true feelings and make meaning. We are all participants in the future of language, says Vuong.
“The body is the ultimate witness to love. We [in Vietnamese culture] don’t say we love you. Through the body and service, you articulate it through paying attention. Nothing can say I love you more than feeling it from somebody and I think this relationship is how I started to see words. I looked at them as things I can move and care for.
“My grandmother, mother and aunt would tell stories to recalibrate and make sense of their past. A story is carried in the body and it’s edited each time the person tells it. What you have by the time they tell it is a masterclass of form, technique, concision, imagery... This is what these women were giving me.”
He then asks: “What happens to our language, this great, advanced technology that we’ve had, when it starts to fail at its function and it starts to obscure, rather than open? The great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet, still not know who they are. Our ‘How are you?' has failed us. We have to find something else. When you’re using language, you can create it, use it to divide people and build walls, or you can turn it into something where we can see each other more clearly, as a bridge.”
And I must mention this bit about following your own path. I am not an artist but as the child of immigrants who had quite a different outlook to me, it cut deep. “The first generation made it here, and to live at all is such a privilege that they’re happy, and even encourage you to put your head down: work, fade away, get your meals, and live a quiet life. And I think the second generation, the great conundrum there, the great paradox, is that they want to be seen. They want to make something. And what a better way to make something and feel yourself with agency than to be an artist? So, so many of us immigrant children end up betraying our parents in order to subversively achieve our parents’ dreams.”
It’s not enough to read this author. You need to hear Ocean’s voice to feel the fullness of his being. Please listen to the full podcast here.
