Ocean Vuong on Hartford, Glastonbury, the American character and the lasting trauma of the people of Vietnam

Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon in 1988, lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines and then got asylum in the United States with his family, eventually settling in Hartford. From this scattered childhood emerged an authentic “American voice,” which will be honored this month with the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award for his 2019 debut novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.”

Vuong’s literary voice didn’t come easily. It was informed by poverty and hardship, in a family of traumatized war refugees. No one in his family knew how to read. Neither did Vuong, until he was 11.

Going to school in Glastonbury gave him perspective about the diverse ways Americans lived. But even that town’s fine school system didn’t entirely bring out the potential in Vuong. He struggled to get good grades at GHS, but 15 years after graduation won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

The Twain award brings Vuong back to Hartford, at least virtually, the city where the semiautobiographical novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is set. Vuong loves the city, as the place that taught him what America is. But he is clear-eyed about its struggles and failings:

“In my Hartford, where the insurance companies that made us the big city had all moved out once the Internet arrived, and our best minds were sucked up by New York or Boston. Where everybody’s second cousin was in the Latin Kings. Where we still sell Whalers jerseys at the bus station twenty years after the Whalers ditched this place to became the Carolina Hurricanes. Hartford of Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, writers whose vast imaginations failed to hold, in either flesh or ink, bodies like ours. Where the Bushnell theatre, the Wadsworth Atheneum (which held the first retrospective on Picasso in America), were visited mostly by outsiders from the suburbs, who park their cars valet and hurry into the warm auditorium halogens before driving home to sleepy towns flushed with Pier 1 Imports and Whole Foods.” (From “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong, published by Penguin Press in 2019.)

The Twain prize is the latest in a long string of literary accolades for Vuong, 31, who is now an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a resident of Northampton, Mass.

In addition to the $625,000 “genius grant” and the $25,000 Twain prize, Vuong has been honored for his poetry and fiction writing with the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection for his poetry book “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.”

In advance of the Oct. 21 Twain award ceremony, Vuong chatted about Hartford, Glastonbury, the American character and the lasting trauma of the people of Vietnam.

How did it feel to win this Mark Twain award in your hometown?

I was so proud of it. When I think about it, Hartford gave me the best education I could get about what America is. It’s a city full of immigrants. Connecticut soil was tended to by immigrants. Eastern Europeans worked the tobacco fields where the airport is now. After World War II, Haitians and Jamaicans did it. In 1990, my family arrived. When I ultimately traveled the country, I understood already a lot of what America is, its complications, divisions, beauty. Hartford gave me that already.

Where did you live in Hartford?

The place I lived on New Britain Avenue was a tenement that was bulldozed to build a YMCA. My home on Franklin Avenue, I couldn’t locate. It was a back apartment on the second floor with a little courtyard with a gravel parking lot.

Why did you go to school in Glastonbury?

Glastonbury, my mother knew it had a much better school system. She had a friend who lived in a housing project in Glastonbury. We put our names under that address. That’s “immigrant innovation.”

What memories do you have of your early days at Naubuc Elementary?

I have to give credit to the best ESL teachers, Mrs. O’Rourke and Mrs. Callahan. They were so patient with me. They taught me how to think and how to read slowly. In the curriculum, speed reading was very popular. ESL teachers taught me it’s OK to slow down. I remember them with me, working over a sentence over and over again, aiming for comprehension, concentrating on one word at a time.

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is a novel but it is based on your life?

Yes. Just like a lot of American novelists, a la Melville, who wrote Moby Dick and lived that life. He was a whaler. Just like J.D. Salinger, who dropped out of prep school. Just like Sylvia Plath. I was interested in autobiographical fiction, presenting the context of a biographical life similar to mine but then animating it with the imagination. Ten percent of the book is real, a family that came from Vietnam, a mother who is mixed race. But what happened [in the book] was a work of the imagination.

Your lead character enjoys riding his bicycle from town to town. What are you saying with this?

That so much of our cultural values were dictated by class and by labor. Where you work influenced who you associated with and how you saw the world. I wanted to give a real diverse portrait of Hartford as a landscape populated by various people. I wanted to show how quickly you can move from the Connecticut River to Franklin Avenue to East Hartford and then all the way up to the mansions.

What did you learn living in the city and going to school in a suburb?

I learned that racial divisions were there and how they were not as fixed as other states or other cities. Segregation was much more in flux because of immigrant populations. There was lower-income housing in East Hartford and part of Glastonbury but there was never a predominantly Black neighborhood there. It was always Albanian, Yugoslavian, Serbia, Montenegro during the conflict in the ’90s, Russian when the eastern bloc dissolved after the Soviet Union. Indian immigrants working in the new tech.

What was your impression of the differences between the city and the suburbs?

That was a more extreme version of America. I lived in Hartford and would see the conditions there and then go to a friend’s house after school and they would live in a mansion next to Kevin Ollie and Ray Allen. I could see their houses from my friend’s house. Then I would go back to Hartford.

How did this multicultural upbringing figure into how you wrote your novel?

There was such an incredibly rich cultural dynamic in close proximity to each other. I really wanted to portray that. In New England, we don’t get credit for having that. There’s this one image of this old colonial, old money, private schools, yachts, the WASP idea of aged history. In fact it is incredibly diverse and continually changing as we speak.

As a teen, you worked in a tobacco field. What did you get out of that?

You learn that the value of work is the value of American life. American life is dictated by labor. I see this as the very root. Labor and land. That’s the genesis of this country, Native American genocidal colonialism and slavery. Here I am in the early aughts, after 9/11, working on the land and seeing immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, who all had the same dreams as parents like mine had working in a nail salon. Our nation truly bonded on capitalism and labor, for better or worse.

Your book depicts a grandmother traumatized by PTSD from the Vietnam War. Is this common?

It’s very common, sadly. My whole family felt it. Most Americans from Vietnam have some sort of mental health challenges. And it was not just from the recent Vietnam war. Vietnam is a country the size of California with 90 million people who have been at war since Kublai Khan’s invasion [in the 13th century]. One war after another, China, the French, the Japanese, the Americans. The toll that takes on mental health is buried into the genes. I was hoping the book would bring more notoriety and more awareness to Vietnamese mental health.

What about Vietnamese Americans who were born in the U.S.?

There’s a lot of research on this, particularly regarding Holocaust survivors. Their children would have nightmares that would depict scenes they’d never lived. There’s a book about it called “It Didn’t Start With You,” written by a neuroscientist [Mark Wolynn]. Sometimes I would have these odd nightmares about violence I never lived through. You see the same symptoms happen in different groups.

How did winning the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” last year change your life?

For a family of immigrants, it was the biggest blessing because I know that I can take care of them for their emergencies. That helps me be able to do my work better without the stress of worrying. A lot of my family members still work in factories and nail salons. So many of them are one bad tooth or one accident away from their money being wiped out. It gave me confidence that I could take care of them.

OCEAN VUONG will receive the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award on Oct. 21, in a virtual ceremony starting at 7 p.m. Vuong will read from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and will receive the $25,000 award from author David Baldacci, a trustee of the Twain House. Admission is free. Signed copies of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” are available at the Twain House bookshop. marktwainhouse.org/event/2020-mtavl-ceremony.

Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.

———

©2020 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.)

Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.