Ocean Vuong on America as Fiction: Monetizing Care, Guilt and Fear
- Ainhoa Aron
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
The Emperor of Gladness, an Ocean Vuong novel published in May 2025, is a work of American fiction. But is it any more fiction than whatever promises America makes to its inhabitants, if not to the world?
A severe shift from the epistolary, poetic form of On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous (an inescapable title in an English Lit classroom) and the experimental poetry collections published in previous, Vuong attempts to write the quintessential American novel and succeeds through and through. One could not praise Vonnegut, Morrison or Baldwin and in the same breath deny the American excellence of Vuong’s Emperor.
I attended Ocean Vuong’s interview at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in September this year and anyone who has heard the author speak will attest that it is a gift to be living at a time in which Ocean Vuong is alive and making art. Vuong begins by slamming the amount of time it took him to tell this story, the story of an epidemic from his adolescence (15 years preceding the publication of Emperor), joking: “my Trump novel, you’re gonna have to wait 15 years!” A great misfortune, as we may have never needed his guidance as much as we do at the present moment in grappling with the collapse of civil liberties and oligarchical rule in various corners of the world. Indeed, Vuong speaks on this difficulty in engaging with the world in a time of unprecedented antipathy, claiming that as a Western society, we’ve forgotten how to deal with grief and look to cure our pain with pharmaceuticals, a theme explored by Emperor through the neglect of the elderly and the industrialisation of ‘care’. Why is this fundamental human capacity of being empathetic towards others being stifled and turned into a money-making scheme? Western society, he adds, is a generalisation when what we mean by it is “heavily armed European countries [...] I’d like to know what the Belgian dream is,” he chuckles, “you only hear of the American dream.”
A dream which, he claims, works as fiction just like history does: telling facts and leaving out other facts. Some characters of Emperor see right through this fiction, while others choose to believe it, clinging to some morsel of hope amidst the capitalist machine America has become. Clinging to this fiction put forward by people in power out of the necessity provided by corporate America, however, leads to societal amnesia and nostalgia. On his U.S. tour for the promotion of his earlier works, Vuong had the opportunity to ask people who voted for Trump and who foster MAGA logic when America was, as they claim, ‘great’ for them. Most of them answer those years in which they were very young, years in which they didn’t have to deal with student debt and unpaid rent and taxes. Culture shames you for being a writer, calling it ‘decadent work’, but people running for office, Vuong contends, people running the country to the ground use the same rhetorical modes. American leaders are in the business of selling the lie that they can restore people their youth, which Vuong claims is “the most American thing.”
Vuong, however, is not in the business of shaming those making do in this deadly corporate machine. Instead, he explores the underlying roots of our apathetic contemporary. The sense of a legitimate notion of goodwill that makes up American national consciousness and identity has been passed down through generations, embellished and carved out to suit modern needs, so that to wake up now would be too costly. Vuong understands this profoundly. Vuong sees America’s civic control box handing out the illusion of choice and serving only inward catharsis: transformation without change. Vuong refuses to give in to this trope and contrastingly charts out a promise of catharsis with Home Market, the Connecticut fast food restaurant in which Emperor’s characters work together to sell the guarantee of human connection in the form of a Thanksgiving meal. Small town East Gladness’ Home Market can promise the good old-fashioned feeling of a time in which you believed in the American dream. The contemporary commercial novel sells a similar promise of catharsis with its choice three-plot or five-plot structure, abiding by the prevailing ideology (or trope) that a protagonist must uncover some particular truth by the end of the novel. To Vuong, the publishing industry is heterophallic - looking for literary release, “I think I’m more interested in literary edging,” Vuong laughs.
At the risk of prolonging this discussion of the American dream, it still feels crucial to delve into Vuong’s exploration of the American dream as a settler colonial dream in Emperor. In the movie the main character Hai and his cousin Sony watch a film remembering the Vietnam war, in which George Washington is painted as a savior and the gory images fetishize this country founded on war. In fact, if one tries to rent an apartment in America, one is confronted with a lexicon of war, former plantations romanticized as ‘antebellum ranches’. American architecture and urban planning mirror the modern measurement of time, which is defined by war: post-war and pre-war writers, interbellum literature, etc. A world so saturated with violence that its very measurements and mappings are defined by it is one that cannot welcome new generations with utopian fantasies and lies: it is the soil of reflexive impotence.
Reflexive impotence, a term coined by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, describes the feeling of helplessness that has led to the youth generation opting out of the very idea of progress as a lie fed to them by a rigged and impossible system. It describes the refusal of opting into the American dream and reminded me of a friend of mine attending Columbia University in New York who saw her peers in what she described as a state of paralysis in the midst of attacks on the rights to free speech and non-violent protest. Vuong’s Emperor, I believe, is a support system for survivors of American modernity. Vuong offers, in his own words, ‘a soft vignette’ in order to bear through the most harrowing things. It is so especially important in the midst of this tidal wave of paralysis that has taken hold of our generation to see fiction as distraction as well as resistance, to know our globalized situations are not isolated incidents but that somewhere in a small town in Connecticut, Lithuanian Grazina eats Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak for dinner and Vietnamese-American Hai doesn’t jump off but crosses the bridge to have dinner with her, to hold these stories close and recognize these stories in our lives.
On September 11th, 2025, in Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, Vuong ends by singing ‘Bright Morning Star’, an Appalachian hymn that brought him comfort at a time when his friends and classmates were being relentlessly attacked by the 2009 opioid epidemic, when this song would be sung at their funerals. In the hall, there was his gentle voice coaxing us into a silence London hardly ever hears and the sound of relief. I swear, for those seconds in which his melody resounded within that hall, it was as if the whole world was releasing a breath it had been holding for a very long time. In that moment, there was care: unpaid-for, human care.
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal-Hodson, Editor-in-Chief
