Ocean Vuong’s latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is a bold and remarkable novel that captures the hopes and disillusionments of people living in today’s America. The story begins in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, with the unlikely encounter between the young Vietnamese-American man, Hai, who is planning to jump from a building, feeling that he has “run out of paths to take,” and the 80-year-old Grazina Vitkus, a World War II refugee from Lithuania. Grazina offers Hai lodging in return for helping to remind her to take her medicine, and their honest friendship illuminates the otherwise stark and cruel world they navigate.
In this novel, the ruthlessness of a capitalist society is keenly felt. Money, or rather, the need for more of it to survive, is a recurring motif. When Hai first joins HomeMarket—a popular fast food chain—he did a trial shift of some four hours, but even then, he nearly did not get paid, as Sony teased him that he forgot to clock Hai’s attendance.
HomeMarket functions as both a physical and metaphorical space, a space where working life and everyday consumption repeats, feeding the society with its mass-produced and artificial food, while its advertising slogan claims to give the people “Thanksgiving for every day of the year.” Overall, there is so much to unpack in East Gladness as a metaphor of place, and all that it says about ordinary folks as citizens of disillusionment and hope: “If you aim for Gladness and miss, you’ll find us. For we are called East Gladness,” a place renamed after “the boy who returned from the Great War with no limbs and became a hero—proof you could lose almost all of yourself in this country and still gain a whole town.”
In the story, the characters do not undergo enormous transformational changes. Instead, the novel is a close-up look at the lives of ordinary people like Grazina and Hai who are doing their best to preserve their dignity and self-worth. Moreover, Vuong chooses to reveal Hai’s past only a few chapters in: Hai was raised by his mother, grandmother, and Aunt Kim, “women spared by the war in body but not in mind.” His mother works in a beauty salon and, according to Hai, has been “stuck on level thirteen” of Tetris “for over a year.” He eventually drops out of college and suffers from drug addiction. Spurred by his failed ambitions, Hai eventually leaves home, telling his mother that he has been accepted as a medical student for a university in Boston, a lie that makes her exceedingly proud.
Firmly anchored in the rich and lively dialogue between Hai and his co-workers at HomeMarket—the manager BJ, Maureen, Aunt Kim, Wayne, and Sony, Hai’s cousin—the novel also reveals the irrevocability and devastating impact of war on the people, regardless of their class or background. Hai and Grazina would, on a regular basis, relive the war through the uncanny role play of battle scenes that resemble real life violence but are “so much like hell it feels fake,” like “making blood-clotted groans while she laughs and blows smoke from her raised crooked finger . . . .” Sony pretends that his father, who fought in the South Vietnamese army, is still alive. Hai and his coterie struggle to put to rest their respective traumatic past: Grazina suffers from dementia but remembers from time to time the atrocity of war, such as begging the soldiers to spare her family, and sometimes sleeps with the dollar note dangling in front of her on the top of the bed. The decision to narrate the aftermath of the war, particularly through the disjointed lives of the immigrants, is an act of resistance against political indifference.
The sense of magical realism in the book is also a powerful device, balancing out the starker truths the novel offers about the everyday oppression that stems from systemic racism, micro-aggression, and capitalism in East Gladness. For example, escaping from a Viet Cong bomb while on his visit to the jeweller to pick out a ring, Sony’s father ends up having a gigantic diamond embedded as a wound in his hand, a symbol of the traumatic war as well as a metaphor for his hidden self-worth. One day they find a writhing coyote outside the restaurant, which turns out to be a man begging for help. There’s BJ in the wrestling ring—known as Deez Nuts, who plays the “Bahama Bomb” wrestling moves to defeat Miss Magician, a beloved local and elderly wrestling champion, making her crumble into “a heap of glitter,” while Maureen supports the gig by strumming her banjo in the background.
Through these original portraits of the working class and their unresolved wounds, the book makes an uncompromising critique on consumerist society and questions the problem of class (im)mobility in modern-day America. No matter how hard they try, Hai, Grazina, and his friends find America falling short of what it promises, simply and especially because they are immigrants or children of the immigrants. For example, Aunt Kim pleads with Hai to lie to his mother, as she wants her own sister to believe that she is living a good life with a big house and a Honda in Florida. Yet, they are also admirable characters for their resilience, humor and optimism. Moreover, one is reminded of the political tension and divisions of the time, witnessed by this generation in “fictional” East Gladness and embodied in everyday life, objects and popular media such as how, in a local pizzeria (Sgt. Pepper Pizza), a poster of Obama ’08 Yes We Can! is still attached to the door. Or at Grazina’s, where Hai and Grazina listen to a radio broadcast reporting on another potential deal to withdraw, by Christmas, American troops from Afghanistan.
Compared with Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the storytelling in The Emperor of Gladness dwells more on the present than the past, centering on the characters rather than any single subjectivity, bringing us back to humanity through the resilience and hope of his protagonists.
Friendship is a vital theme that runs through the whole book. It is embodied in everyday camaraderie, something more nourishing and redeeming than the promise of money. It’s intangible and cannot be bought, but can be freely given. For example, we catch a glimpse of how Hai has tried to understand Grazina, and his commitment to help Grazina with her daily dosage of pills; we see Hai and his co-workers from HomeMarket’s unflinching support at BJ’s wrestling gig despite the booing she receives from the crowd. For Sony, friendship helps him cope with the loss of his father. In this way, Hai and his co-workers at HomeMarket continue to love East Gladness, with its “two McDonald’s and one GameStop.” The Emperor of Gladness is not a story where dreams come true. Rather, it is about the honesty and generosity these characters can afford, and the ability to stay resilient despite pressures of an unforgiving society, fraught with its racial and political divides. Ultimately, the triumph does not lie in actual improvements, but in how they forge a chosen family for themselves, in which they feel understood for who they are.
