Ocean Vuong on the Moral Questions of Fiction

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

*

In this episode from 2021, poet and author Ocean Vuong joins Talk Easy following the re-release of his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. We discuss reckoning with one’s work from a distance (5:08), why he wrote an autobiographical novel (6:30), the cage of American masculinity (11:00), how he’s stayed the course, creatively, amidst oppressive systems (19:56), and what it means to be a first-generation writer (22:43).

On the back-half, we wrestle with the grief of his mother’s passing and the tragic shootings in Atlanta (27:30), and the collective uncertainty of 2021 (42:38). Then, before we go, a tribute to his late mother and a song by Nina Simone (49:32).

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: In thinking about your mother’s legacy, you have this quote from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “Sometimes I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam.”

Then, on page 31, you wrote, “As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”

Do you remember when you started to understand the long arc of her journey—and where you fit inside of it?

Ocean Vuong: No, and I think I still don’t. You can only know from the position of a son, which is why I wrote this book, as a way of getting this character to ask these questions that my mother would never have to ask. I think, ultimately, I couldn’t ask these questions of her. I would even argue that I am not ethically privy to her answers.

Fiction creates this ethical plane where the most challenging questions could be asked. That is where I really agree with the late critic John Gardner, when he writes On Moral Fiction. He got a lot of flack for that because people thought he had a very conservative approach to writing fiction, that it should be based on morals and family values. But it wasn’t.

Fiction is strongest when it launches a moral question. When it goes out and seeks to answer. To create an architecture in which the book can try to answer a moral question. Even if it’s a contradictory binary. But the attempt to do that makes fiction worthwhile.

The questions that we couldn’t ask in life because the costs would be too much. Fiction and narrative art give us a vicarious opportunity to see these questions play out, at no true cost to our own. I treated my own life that way and the lives of my family. I was very protective of them. I wouldn’t dare to ask them these questions, so I’ll ask these questions to the holograms.

Sam Fragoso: You’ve said multiple times in our talk that you’re not courageous enough to ask those questions. Is it a matter of courage, or is it a matter of respect?

Ocean Vuong: That’s a brilliant observation. I think when I say “courage,” I’m thinking perhaps too informed, too trapped in this capitalistic, “go get ‘em” writer approach. The Joan Didion approach, it’s all there for me. I loved in her documentary when they asked, “When you see this toddler on LSD, what do you think?” She’s like, “Oh, it’s a gold mine.” So much of that idea of courage and lack thereof comes from that, from being a product of a capitalistic system.

You’re giving me this other angle, which perhaps is the most authentic one. I think it was ultimately about respect. Even if I had courage as a writer, I couldn’t have lived with it. I would have disrespected my family by using their answers for art. That was a line that I drew. Many people asked me about that line in this novel, but I drew it when I was writing my poems.

The poems create a mythos out of the context of history. They actually use history as a launching pad, rather than a final place of rest for the poems, which is why I use the topology of the Greek myths to position Vietnamese bodies against. I don’t know where I will end up between these two polar stances, respect or courage, but I hope that by the time I’m done with this life, I end up on the side of respect.

__________________

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.