2021-07-08
1 小时 5 分钟So a refugee at the age of two, Ocean vuong and his mom found themselves fleeing Saigon, Vietnam, traveling across the globe, and then dropped into a world that was simultaneously a source of renewal and safety, while also delivering a daily dose of profound othering and challenge.
The English language came slowly to ocean, struggling to read at the age of eleven.
But over time, his deep curiosity and sense of observation and openness led to a love of language that grabbed hold and just never let go.
In 2016, he released a critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night sky, that dazzled the literary world.
His gorgeously written and deeply stirring first novel, on Earth, were briefly gorgeous, which became an instant New York Times bestseller.
It draws on his experience growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, with a mom who shared a complex love in a community he seemed perpetually estranged from.
A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur genius Grant, Ocean is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the TS Eliot prize.
His writing has been featured in the Atlantic, Harpers magazine, the Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times, and so many others.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
We're in this really interesting moment in time, I think, you know, and I would imagine, you know, the past handful of years have.
Have been strange and transformative in a lot of ways for you.
But let's take a little bit of a step back in time, because a lot of the, you know, the seeds of your story really don't just start in Hartford, Connecticut, in the US.
It really starts in Vietnam, in, I guess, the late eighties, early nineties, when the family fled, as so many did, and found themselves refugees, effectively, in Connecticut.
You coming up really just knowing your mom largely and her touching down in a place that probably when she was a child, the notion of her trying to find a life, you know, in Hartford, Connecticut, in the United States, was the most bizarre and foreign thing that she could ever have imagined.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was disorienting.
You know, I think war displaces, and I think PTSD is a displacement.
You know, it's basically the experience of trauma taking over the present.
And so I always say that to remember, it's a very costly thing for anyone, whether it's a national memory or a personal one, because you literally risk the present.