HERE’S WHY

I have no real structure. I just wake up; I meditate. That’s the only thing that I adhere to, and I just do whatever my mind gravitates to. It’s utter flow and it shouldn’t be that way. In my head, I want to be the writer that wakes up at four, starting in the blue dark, and prays to the gods wherever they are, and then scribbles as the sun rises. It never happens. I really don’t know how I get anything done, actually. Because I can’t drive. I can’t really manage a property, which I have. Adulting is very difficult. I made peace with that. Being a professor [OCEAN is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst] feeds into that chaos because I don’t have to do anything other than teach.

Oh my god, okay. The beautiful thing about living in Northampton is there’s a very rich queer community and we really help each other. There are farmers, there are contractors, sculptors. If you need a pot fixed, there’s a queer person. My friend Dick would fix your ceramic pot. We do meal trains. One of my friends just had top surgery and they’re laid out and so we’re doing a meal train for them. Another friend of mine, her partner died of an overdose last year, and so we did a meal train for her, it’s just a way of taking care of each other. It’s just showing up for someone, literally feeding someone through very, very challenging times. I’ve been thinking about this a lot: What is queerness? What is hetero­normative power? Often we think of hetero­normative structures as structures of monolithic power and conquest. Much of that is true. But I also look at it and I also see such pervasive sadness associated with power. It’s actually quite primitive, the ideas that control so much of the power structures in our country. It’s spiritually primitive compared to what we have on the margins because we’re so invested in a more sincere question of, what does someone need and how do I show up for them?

What brought you there? Did you say, “I want some poetry tonight?”

I was probably too nervous. You probably noticed that I didn’t even look up. I would read with my head down the whole time and that was my little trick. I learned to be okay with not having any banter, not having any clever remarks. I learned a lot about writing and living, reading at open mics. I started out at an open mic, Bar 13, near Union Square, sitting in the back of the bar and waiting my turn for three minutes on the stage. It smelled like bleach, because there was probably an orgy the night before.

Who knows? It was a lot. You needed the drinks when you could get them. How do you introduce yourself to the world with three minutes? I was so terrified that I hid. I returned to my world. I looked at the sheet of paper like a portal. People seemed to really respond to that. I realised, “Oh, you don’t have to have jokes.” This isn’t a comedy show. People are here to feel sad or to have their sadness confirmed. There’s joy in that communal confirmation. It was really wonderful to me to realise I could be myself. Even if it’s a limitation, if I embrace it authentically, then the world can recognise that. Then I took that idea into my work. I knew that if you commit to something, even an idea that people don’t see any value in, you can go in and harness value from it as if you’re diving for treasure, but you’re diving into yourself.

Thank you for saying that. Thank you for being there. Do you write poems yourself?

Yeah. It’s like a drug, I have to be honest. I’m an addict. I’m recovering. Still, I don’t talk about it too much, because I don’t feel like I’m truly sober. I am since 2013, but I still think like an addict. It’s just like my vices are controlled and they’re all literary, but I can feel it: “Oh, that’s a great line.” I’ll stop what I’m doing. I’ll lay down and try to get that line right or I’ll look at an image or a tree and I’ll see some kind of connection. It feels too much like when I was doing the other bad stuff that was destroying my body. I think my sobriety is like crashing a car. Your car is flipped over in the ditch and you look around and you realise, “Oh god, I’m still here.” And then you just start crawling on the side of the road. You crawl; you don’t look back. You’re too scared. You don’t know what’s back there. And after a while you get on your hands and knees, and then you’re miles away from the car. You start walking. You see a thrift shop. You go in, you put on some new clothes and you keep walking. And eventually you walk into a university. You walk onstage. You walk into a publisher’s house. I’m still walking from that car crash. That’s the metaphor that I feel.

Well, it’s a cliche in New England, but it was Oxy and Percocets. And then if you crushed that over weed, it’s like a double downer; you mix it with coke, then you have a speedball. So it was those. All the white things you can crush. It was rough. I still remember what it feels like, and it’s the best thing in the world. I mean, this is why it is what it is, because it creates a synthetic heaven, but the price is hell.

No. It’s bodily. I liked the uppers because I didn’t want to escape the world. A lot of my friends went to heroin because they wanted to get out. I understood that, but I never wanted to get out. I just wanted more of what was here. I wanted more of the beautiful sunset. And when you’re on the uppers, it just magnifies what’s there, and then you feel even more thrilled. My drug of choice was coke. And it was this ability to really be drawn into the world further. But it was not real, because the world should have been already enough.

Vietnamese is monosyllabic. It’s tonal. So every sound has its own life, and English can’t say that. And so if you’re a Vietnamese child listening in a Vietnamese household, your life depends on every syllable. We also don’t have tenses. We just have a tense modifier, the word roi, at the end. And so you have to really pay attention to the end of the sentence. In a way, it’s this Olympian journey of listening. By the time I listened to English, I realised that Vietnamese became almost like a superpower. When entering the English realm, I could hear music underneath everything. I could hear tones. And this is why I’m really influenced by singers like Whitney Houston and Etta James, because how they articulate, how they whisper a word in their songs, changes the feeling. And I’ve always been trying to keep that awareness when I’m thinking about tone. A book is silent, in a way. It can’t utter itself. But the way the language operates, there are shadows of tones, and tones dictate mood and feeling. And this is all through my learning of and speaking Vietnamese.

It is complicated. I always felt that there is a great opportunity for someone like myself to derange English in ways that it’s never been done, because it has excluded so many people of colour. It has been the tool to conquer so many people of colour while excluding them in the utterances of power. I felt intimidated by it early on. Because poetry has been so reified in the ivory tower. The readings that I went to early on in my community college were filled with old white people. No one under 50. And so there’s this sense that you’re trespassing into a genre. But I never felt like learning English and writing in English was a betrayal of who I was, because the context of my life as a refugee put me here. American bombs and American foreign policy were the genesis of my American identity. I want to use it, not to conform and gain power from it in the same way that you write a respectable email to your boss, but I want to enter through the back door, through this mischievous work. To “derange the senses” as Rimbaud, one of my heroes, said. And I think deranging English as a monolithic standardised force through poetry is such a potent project. I’ll never finish it, but participating in it has so many opportunities to disrupt, discover and reclaim so much that has been lost. When I consider the troubled position that I feel about it, the possibilities far outweigh some of the paradoxes embedded in it.

I just found this incredible band called Lebanon Hanover. I think it’s the truest inheritor of Joy Division. It’s very moody, gothic, unsmiling European, black mascara. And it reminded me a lot of growing up in the goth age with my friends with UFO pants.

So true. I liked the smoking cigarettes on the bench after.

I just finished one [‘Time Is a Mother’, to be published by Penguin next Spring]. It’s weird to say, but I think it’s the only thing that I feel truly proud of. I like this collection. We’re dealing with first proofs now. Usually, at this point, when I look at them, I want to write to my editor and say, “Just let me start all over. I hate this. This is not art. I’ll give you all the money back, just forget this ever happened.” It happens every time, but this time it didn’t happen. I think everybody grows, and your work either catches up to your growth, or it doesn’t. I think with this collection, I match where my book is, and I feel, really, it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I don’t regret it like I usually do. Usually, I regret a book. I feel I compromised so much, or I haven’t developed enough skill to write the best version of the book.

It is. I mean, the text is a fossil. The text is a photograph. ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ [Ocean’s debut novel] was a photograph of my mind in, I believe it was March 2019. That was the last time I handed in any corrections, and it’s frozen there. Naturally, I’m changed. My hair changed, my cells changed, the tone of my skin. Like a photograph, a book is stuck in time. So you make peace with it. But here, everything is caught up. I looked at it, and I said, “I have no real edits.” I think that’s one of the first times I felt I achieved something in my very short career. I had to write my first two books in order to write something that is truly myself. There’s joy, there’s experimentation. Particularly with the first book [the poetry collection ‘Night Sky with Exit Wounds’], I just felt, “Am I a poet? How do I write this so that people would believe that I’m a real poet? How do I really get into the club?” With my novel and now this collection, I started to really question if it’s even a seat at the table that I want. Now I think I don’t actually want to be at the table. I want to question whether the table is the destination, and I got to do that here. And it felt really, really good. It’s strange to say, because I get immediately very sceptical when I say something like, “I love my work.” It’s pretentious; it’s probably delusional. But for the first time, I really love these poems, and I’m just really excited to share this collection with the world. I can really look at it in its entirety and say, “Wow, I’m fully there. I didn’t compromise anything for the first time.”

I think it means, “That’s it.” There’s always the drive of wanting to make more. But to me, it’s like putting down your weapons when you’re home. It’s: “Oh wow, I got here in three books.” It’s such a good feeling, that I’m not inspired to write anything else. I think I want to write a few novels that I have ideas about, but as far as poetry, I just think, “There it is.”

Oh, that’s interesting. I think Buddhist philosophy tells us that there are always personas. Buddhism believes that there are private selves, secret selves that we don’t even know about: the way we pick our nose, the way we position our bodies when we’re alone in a room, is very different than when we’re amongst family, very different when we’re amongst friends, very different when we’re amongst colleagues, and so on and so forth. So there’s so many levels. To me, it’s never a binary of just public and private. It’s a matrix of so many performances, to the point where I think one could spend one’s whole life exploring, “What is a true self?” and not get there. When it comes to pressure, I think I was very fortunate to never feel any pressure from anybody, editors or publicists. My main goal was to use the platform of publicity to talk as eloquently as I can about the ideas that were important to me. That’s still my goal. I have friends who really love “fame.” They thrive on it, extroverts; they like the performance, they turn it up, and they really enjoy it. And I feel like, after I do these things, I have to go to a hotel, and just shut off the lights and then just lay down.

I think so. I thought more about my joy and satisfaction in finishing this last book, where I could finally say something like that. And it comes from this awareness of what an Asian male frame, this avatar, should be or should do. And in a way it’s anticipating what misjudgement comes. But it’s also having fun with it. Maybe the thesis of my work is, “I’m four times stronger than I look, and here’s why.” The “here’s why” is my work.

You’re the first, so I’m giving you the exclusive. The context was to celebrate that there are so many sides to us; there’s so many facets to who we are, that an author has more to them than what the author photo suggests or what the profile suggests. Instagram, I really appreciate, particularly as a writer of colour, I rarely get to have my narrative in my own hands and I rarely get to show what’s valuable to me. I’ve been in interviews where I’m described as, “surprisingly eloquent despite his preteen frame.” And that was under the guise of “objective” reportage.

Yes.

Those frameworks, I was never into. Because I always describe my work as that of a junkyard artist. I take older, defunct literary techniques and I cast them into new uses. And I think it’s the same. I don’t feel like a pup, it just didn’t feel true, but I like the mask and I like the anonymity, even amongst people who are familiar with each other. So I just kind of, I could say I co-opted the schema.

Guilty as charged. It is what it is. But I don’t go anywhere beyond that. There’s no barking or wagging. I’m glad that you asked though, because I always want to talk about how power and submission works in a novel, but I’m always afraid that very hetero journalists will just not…

Absolutely. This is true with colonialism in general. What the Vietnamese did with the baguette, turning the baguette into banh mi, that’s bottomhood innovation. Fred Moten says that amongst so many things, the bottom of the slave ship, amongst so many horrors, was also a language lab. It was the site of problem solving and innovation for survival. And we can’t forget that reality. And I think that’s what I’m really interested in: that what you saw as hell, or hellish, was also a means of dignity and power and innovation. And I didn’t see that in the culture; I just saw so much aversion to it. Even amongst my favourite queer writers, sex was glossed over, right? “We collapsed on the bed and afterward, as the light came through, I…” Wait, afterward? Come on. And there’s this puritan anxiety. Even in a “revolutionary” film like ‘Call Me by Your Name’.

To a tree. We haven’t fallen far from the Bible. When Elio was experimenting with a girl, it’s fully there, it’s recognisable. It has this context that does not need translation. And I think when the camera pans, it’s the failure of translation or the refusal to depict it. And it’s almost like the format of the film surrendering or turning its back on its subjects. It’s a betrayal to turn to the tree, which is just absurd.

Yeah, we all wanted to see Timothée Chalamet poop.

No, I think about this often. And I think it has a lot to do with Vietnamese culture. We live very comfortably in the grotesque, which I think vulgarity branches out of. Western empires have a very different relationship with the grotesque and the vulgar than the global South, particularly in Vietnam. There’s this hypocritical demand for piety or respectability politics from the Western empires of colonised peoples. Meanwhile, they never had to see the grotesque reality of colonialism and death. And so there’s this demand, even in art, even in novels, to be cohesive, restrained, controlled. To have a balance. You have a sense that these values of art-making were created in Versailles, amongst beautifully symmetrical chandeliers. Meanwhile, the folks who are coming out of the global South do not have the privilege of symmetry, cohesion; their lives are factored by the empire. I think Vietnam’s being a small country no bigger than California, struggling with imperial forces for nearly 2000 years, from Kublai Khan to China, to Japan, the French, the Americans, means that we are very comfortable with the grotesque. Even in terms of what we eat: fish sauce is literally liquified fish corpses. And we turn that into the essence of life. You go to visit a village that makes fish sauce, and you can smell the rot of life, the biome, the fermentation, this essential feeling. We are very comfortable with death. Death and the grotesque and the vulgar were always a part of living and dying and it’s beautiful. And I think that’s why I put sex and death next to each other in my book. They’re side by side; there’s no judgment on it. It’s what we do all the time. It’s what ‘Call Me by Your Name’ as a film didn’t do. And so I’m interested in that as part of the human condition. And it would be a great shame if I replicated the same lens through which the Western zeitgeist has judged what is vulgar or grotesque. I would just leave myself out of it, which would be a great loss. I couldn’t do that.