If you’ve spent any part of your life in New England, something about The Emperor of Gladness will be immediately familiar. Much of the novel takes place behind the counter of a fast-casual chain called HomeMarket, known for comforting American classics like rotisserie chicken, cornbread and meatloaf, and a general ambience of “Thanksgiving every day of the year.” I couldn’t help but think of Boston Market, and when I ask Ocean Vuong, speaking over Zoom from New York City, he confirms the inspiration. Like his protagonist, Hai, Vuong worked at Boston Market for three years in college to help support his single mother without putting their combined income over the cap for Section 8 housing. His first choice would have been to work at Bruegger’s Bagels—another East Coast staple—but he had a friend working at Boston Market already, so it was the easiest option.
While searching for their menu to refresh my memory, I discovered that the once-ubiquitous chain has crumpled in on itself in recent years, with widespread closures prompting devastated op-eds: “My heart sunk into my chest” wrote Nicoletta Richardson for TODAY.com. The outsize emotions don’t make sense unless you accept the promise of Boston Market’s marketing—that it offers more than just a meal. The food Vuong describes in the novel is mass-produced, loaded with dyes and preservatives and shipped to HomeMarket in frozen sacks; it’s certainly nothing like what grandma would make. Yet there is indeed something of a spirit of family created within HomeMarket’s walls, where 19-year-old Hai, his cousin Sony and their coworkers take care of one another and their customers.
“I call it circumstantial family,” Vuong says. “So much of our time in this country . . . is founded on this arbitrary group of people cobbled together in an office or a shift, whether it’s in a restaurant or a loading dock or a factory, a warehouse. . . . And all of a sudden kinships arise in places where they’re not really supposed to. . . . After a while, you start to know what someone’s cough is. You can tell [who they are] by their gait, by the gum that they chew, what kind of perfume they wear. I mean, you even start to know their BO, right? After three or four hours into a shift, I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s that person behind me. And then you can never forget it.”
Our story’s HomeMarket franchise is located in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. Each member of its crew suffers through their shifts with their own albatross around their neck. Hai is maintaining a lie to his mother that he’s attending medical school in Boston, though he never even applied (and couldn’t have, since he dropped out of college). Sony doesn’t want to talk about it, but his mother is in jail, and he’s living in a halfway house while he tries to come up with her bail. Russia, who takes the drive-thru orders, is working to put his sister through rehab in New Hampshire. However much affection their circumstantial intimacy breeds, there’s little to nothing any of the crew can do to help one another. And yet again and again, each goes out of their way to offer the others small kindnesses—what Vuong describes as “kindness without hope.”
“I wouldn’t think of it unless I lived through it,” he explains. “What I saw growing up severely poor, under the poverty line, is that these acts of kindness don’t change anyone’s life; they don’t even alleviate anything.” It’s an idea Vuong’s been trying to capture in his work for years, beginning with his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in which a young man works on a Connecticut tobacco farm.
“It’s easy to give when you have so much, right?” Vuong continues. “It’s easy for a millionaire or billionaire to just give. But for folks in those communities, they don’t have those funds. So they have to give themselves. . . . And I haven’t seen anything like that in the world that I’m in now, in academia or this professionalized white-collar world. I just haven’t seen it. I’ve seen a lot of kindness, but not kindness without hope. Not kindness that has nowhere to go.”
“Sometimes I feel like I want to turn to someone and say, ‘Have you ever stepped on a baguette?’ at a gala. I think I would be thrown out.”
The first glimpse of this kindness comes early in the story, in a vivid scene between Hai and Grazina, a Lithuanian octogenarian who has given him a place to stay in exchange for his help. Grazina has been living alone since her medical aide left, and she’s struggling to manage her dementia. When she meets Hai, he’s in deep despair, and she tells him that she knows “the secret to getting rid of every sorrow known to man” before bringing him outside with a bag of dinner rolls. Together, they scatter the rolls in the mud and crush them under their feet. In Vuong’s redolent prose, it’s an absolutely gorgeous moment: “the crumbs sloughing off, leaving a powdery comet shooting across the mud.”
Reading that passage, it’s impossible not to want to stomp on some rolls. Vuong says that while he doesn’t know anyone who’s actually made a self-care practice out of trampling baked goods, he does have some personal experience. A decade ago, while walking in Philadelphia, he came upon a surreal vision: 12 croissants inexplicably stacked in a pyramid at the foot of a tree.
“I don’t know what got into me. I was, like, possessed, and I just started stomping on them,” he says. “I did exactly what I described in the book, scratching them around. It felt—I’ve never been so joyful in my life, right? Stomping croissants.”
After coming down from his elation “like a psychopath,” Vuong thought, “All right, I’m a poet. I’ve got to make something. Why did I do that? There’s got to be some sort of significance.”
“It felt so decadent, so unimaginable that it . . . broke through. A new feeling. And I wanted Hai and Grazina to have the joy that I felt. . . . I was like, you guys have got to feel this because I can’t be the only one. And then maybe part of the craziness of being a novelist is that you create people who share your values, but, on the other hand, they don’t exist.”
Bringing this level of absurdity and even humor—the novel is quite funny—into his work was a distinctive shift for Vuong, whose debut was, for the most part, unrelentingly devastating.
“When On Earth came out,” he says, “it became a big book.”
This is an understatement: It swept best of the year lists and was recently named one of the New York Times readers’ picks for the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. But Vuong’s friends knew how much funnier he could be. “A lot of people were excited. My friends were disappointed.”
It was hard to express the witty side of himself while “carrying my family’s story. It’s carrying history. And I was very aware that publishing in America in the 21st century means that a lot of non-Vietnamese people will read the book, if I’m even lucky to have a wide readership. So I knew that I just did not want an invitation for readers to laugh at the story in On Earth.”
“If you have nowhere to go, if you end up nowhere, then what do you have?”
In 2019, Vuong’s mother died of breast cancer, and The Emperor of Gladness is his first book written entirely after her death. It was the hardest book he’s written yet, “maybe the hardest ever.”
“Everything else was writing for my family, in a way. Not exactly to give to them, but, oh, this will get me a job. This will get me a career so I can take care of them. And then by the time I wrote this book, I had all that. But also a lot of my family were gone,” he says. Far sooner than he wanted to be, he found himself faced with the question, “If I wrote for myself, what would it look like?” The answer: “It looks like this book.”
Since publishing his debut, Vuong had grown as a writer, expanding his skills and broadening his vision, building on the techniques he used in his first novel. (He says “it doesn’t matter if a reader knows this,” but I was very struck by learning that he thinks of The Emperor of Gladness as the debut novel that the aspiring writer protagonist of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog, would write.) He felt ready to tackle different tones and a heftier scope: This new novel is over 400 pages. He was also now spending time in a different sphere, academia, which had a noticeable dearth of humor. In the rarefied circles of the literary elite, it’s hard to imagine someone giving in to the vulnerability required for a moment of absurd, truthful connection like what Hai and Grazina share over the trampled rolls.
“Everyone is so uptight and self-conscious that they would never do anything like that. And sometimes I feel like I want to turn to someone and say, ‘Have you ever stepped on a baguette?’ at a gala. I think I would be thrown out,” Vuong laughs, “but I kind of want to just ask people—or ‘Have you ever questioned the validity of your body in a bathtub?’ or ‘Did you ever want to jump off a bridge?’ But, you know, you can’t say that. So I think only in literature now can I utter it.”
When he was growing up, Vuong says that people asked questions like those all the time on their smoke breaks, at the bus stop—and they did it “half jokingly, half as a way of invitation into the dark world of confession.” The Emperor of Gladness is stitched from similar scenes of connection stolen in scraps of downtime around its characters’ labor.
Capturing the value of these idle moments in a novel meant consciously going against the relentless American imperative to optimize—“learn a language in 20 days, you know, lose 20 pounds in a month”—which hovers over all of us like a bad manager. We’re supposed to want progress at all costs, and if we can’t have progress, we must at least have the appearance of it. In fiction, that means action and conflict and that, by the end, our heroes overcome what’s holding them back.
“It’s cathartic to say, oh, God, they got out of there, right? And I’m like, well, people don’t, and also when they don’t, it doesn’t mean their lives are failures.”
Instead, Vuong’s book “handles the people as they are.” He says that “the central premise of this novel is that there is no improvement. Nobody gets a better job. No one gets a raise. It’s just all stagnant.”
Still, we’re left with something precious. “The question is, if you have nowhere to go, if you end up nowhere, then what do you have? And I hope the answer for some readers would be you have people. You have characters, and that should be enough.”
Read our starred review of The Emperor of Gladness.
Photo of Ocean Vuong by Gioncarlo Valentine.