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Photo Credit: Peter Bienkowski

When he was two, Ocean Vuong ’12 landed in Connecticut with his family, refugees from Vietnam. Considering himself his family’s “one chance” at moving up the socioeconomic ladder, he found his way to Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a B.A. in English with a focus on 19th century American literature.

Vuong went on to write the bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019) and two books of poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022).

Currently on hiatus from writing as he awaits the publication of his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025), the MacArthur “genius” fellow has been focusing on photography and his first show at the Toledo Museum of Art. We caught up with him to talk about his journey from Saigon and his life as an artist.

How was your family’s experience moving to the United States?

I was two when I came over and, interestingly enough, my first memory of America—and it became a very quintessential American memory—was eating KFC. That was because the church that sponsored us gave us a stack of KFC coupons, which my family immediately called Old Man Chicken because of the picture of Colonel Sanders on the coupons. None of us could read English.

It was unfathomable how good it was to us. We were coming out of postwar Vietnam at a time when folks were cutting their rice rations with sawdust. I remember my grandmother and my mother coming home with these buckets of chicken, and we felt like we made it.

Your family started out life in the U.S. in New England?

Hartford, Connecticut. We were surrounded by Jamaican, Haitian, and Dominican immigrants whose families had worked the fields in New England after World War II, so it was already a place of deep, rich immigration. It was not so strange to us, and we were not received as strangers. We had no TV or radio, so I did not know America was mostly white until I was 11, 12 years old. Not until I finally made it to a mall and the suburbs. Nowadays immigrants can go to YouTube to get some sense of the world.

The community embraced us, they saw us. At the heart of this was a legacy of endurance and success from Black and Brown immigrant communities coming through the Great Migration, settling in Hartford, and working in those fields.

We were war refugees. Many of us never aspired to be doctors, lawyers, or businesspeople, even in the old country. We were farmers, and we would be farmers forever, and that was fine. We’ve been doing that for a thousand years. When we came to America, there was none of that aspiration. And so we received everything in that community as a bonus. I’m grateful for that.

What prompted you to come to New York?

I think the larger answer might be queerness. I didn’t know what New York was, but I had to try it. And so it was kind of like this North Star. I went to New York to go to business school. There was no pressure from my family. I didn’t have to overcome immigrant family expectations, but I ended up putting pressure on myself. I was lucky to have folks who said, “Go do whatever you want. If you fail, there’s a seat right next to me at the nail salon.” And even McDonald’s. My mom said, “You can be a manager at McDonald’s. That’s a salary, right?”

But the pressure is there for anyone who is awake in America. You look around and say, okay, my people tell me I can do whatever I want, but I see them struggling, and I know that I’m their way out. I’m the foot forward. So I’ve got to put that foot in the right place, in the most practical place.

I thought maybe marketing. Marketing is art, and I can look at art. It’s communication. I had this desire to communicate. I didn’t yet know I wanted to be a poet, but I had this desire to communicate. I went to Pace University to study business and marketing. But I couldn’t do it. I was surrounded by people in suits, and when they went off to internships at Goldman Sachs and Chase Bank, I felt like a fraud. Who was I kidding?

So I walked out one late October afternoon. You could see the Brooklyn Bridge from Pace Library. And I looked at that bridge and remembered poems I had read by Hart Crane and Walt Whitman, “To Brooklyn Bridge” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” And I thought, okay, let me walk across that bridge and decide. I walked across and said, “That’s it. I’m not going to go back.” I never went back.

What happened next?

I was too ashamed to go home and tell my mom I failed. So I bummed around. I lost my housing, so I stayed on friends’ couches. I went to open mics. I told myself that if I was going to be here, I might as well follow in the footsteps of my heroes, Allen Ginsburg, James Baldwin, and Amira Baraka, and stay in the East Village and see what happens.

One day, I realized I had to go home. I was running out of money, but I couldn’t go home empty-handed. I was the only one. My family had one die to cast, not even two dice, just one—me. A friend suggested I try CUNY; I was still considered a resident and could get in-state tuition. So I enrolled in Brooklyn College and earned a B.A. in English. I told my mom I was earning a business degree.

Could you talk about your experience in the English department? Who were your mentors?

The B.A. was great in that I got the core curriculum, which people bemoan and ask things like, “Why am I here studying rocks when I’m a biochemistry major?” I asked the same thing for about five minutes, and then my mind started opening. I’m telling you, to this day, I still use stratified rock as a metaphor for history and time and literary traditions. When I teach, I say, “Look, it’s like stratified rock. We are the top. We’re the grass, and the grass is the thinnest part. And it’s the briefest part. So while we’re alive, we have to do what we can. The dead have spoken, and they are the stratified rock there.” And that came from Geology 101, core curriculum, Brooklyn College.

My professors and mentors were Ronnie Natov, Geri DeLuca [professor emerita], and Ben Lerner. At the time, I didn’t have a sense that Vietnamese American life and Vietnamese history were viable for poetry. My teachers at Brooklyn College said, “If you don’t do it, who will?”

I didn’t understand that at first. So they gave me Isaac Bashevis Singer and they gave me Toni Morrison. They said, “Look at Morrison’s Beloved; she’s writing about the first generation coming out of slavery. I was able to see the parallel. My mother is similar in how she witnessed the war, and now she’s on the other side of it. So if Morrison can go back 150 years and salvage a story, here I am living in the first generation of it; I need to write this down.

Your work speaks directly to your life as a Vietnamese refugee in America and a gay man.

Everything I write comes through this body and how this body is perceived in the world. And so that’s categorical, but it’s also specific. It’s this body and it’s an Asian body. But I can’t start the day seeing myself as a category determined by media or cultural abstractions. I have to start as Ocean. And Ocean moves through all of this.

You are taking a break from writing and reacquainting yourself with photography.

Yes. Photography is not new for me; I began shooting some years ago, photos of my friend’s band. But what got me exploring other subjects is that when I was 19, I published my first poem in the Connecticut Poetry Society’s journal. It was a small thing. And I had won this little award at that time. It might as well have been the Pulitzer—you’re 19, you win a poetry prize. I remember getting the prize and the issue in the mail, and I biked to my mother’s nail salon. I couldn’t wait to tell her that I was legitimate, that I didn’t waste my life on this weird thing that I’d been doing that nobody understands. And I got to her nail salon and showed it to her. The first thing she said was, “Well, how come it’s only one page?” There’s nothing like a mother to bring you right back down to earth. And being illiterate, the next thing she said was, “I can’t read it.”

After that incident with my mother, I wanted to start shooting photographs of my family. I wanted to show my mother my vision of the world and how I saw all of us. So I’ve been taking these little documentary photos ever since. When I showed them to her, she said something that kind of haunts me to this day, and colors my understanding of my work. I showed her the photos, and she looked through them and she said, “Wow, our life is so sad.”

As soon as she said that, that’s exactly what I saw. And it’s interesting that in Vietnamese, the word sad is buồn. But it doesn’t just mean sad. There’s an undercurrent. It has a more capacious definition that includes a type of wistful, melancholic beauty. You can say, “I am buồn,” and you just said you’re sad. But if you go look at a sunset—you stop your car, go out, and seek it out—you can also say buồn. So it applies to this kind of fleeting lost somberness, which made a lot of sense with what I was taking.

And I started to see that in all of my work, my novels later on, in my poems, which are laced with this kind of sadness. It was a private practice. Only very recently, my friends, many of whom are photographers, started to see my images. And they told me that I needed to start sharing them or it would be a waste. So I began to commit to it, and it’s been a lovely, lovely relationship.

With writing you have to be exact, and there’s no luck. Sontag said it best—there’s no luck in writing. I’ve never accidentally written a good sentence. You wrangle away and it’s painstaking. But you can accidentally take a good photo.

You are a poet, novelist, photographer, and as importantly, an educator. What do you see as today’s generation of students’ greatest strengths?

They’re so good at expressing their needs. I admit my generation was a bit “it is what it is. Take it or leave it. Do what you can.” But they have this kind of spirit that says, “No, we are going to get what we want.”

This new sense of self-determination has come from the efforts of LGBTQ activism, which has made space for queer folks to be more normalized in fighting for our rights, and I’m really proud to see my young students not only make space for queer voices, but for queer students to lead discussions, movements, and to center the cultural conversation around themselves and their needs with poise, determination, and pride.

And I think we’re seeing a lot of that in the political discourse as well. Their demands are heard. The students who I educate, educate me as much as I do any of them.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

I want to thank the Brooklyn College Department of English for getting me an emergency grant in 2009, when I lost my housing and was one semester away from graduating.

My housing situation blew up and I was out on the street, and I don’t know how they did it but they bailed me out. The Department of English advocated to help me. I wrote them a note that I had to go back to Hartford and they said, “No, no, no. We’re not going to let you leave. We’re going to figure this out the one last semester.” Then they came back with the funds. I don’t know what would have happened without that.