The Emperor of gladness

I kept reading about a fabulous newer author and his new book, so I ordered the book, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, to see what all the noise was about. I read it but it was a hard go because it was so sad and depressing. In the midst of all the chaos and destruction going on right now, I just wanted to stop and watch cat reels on FB for awhile. Which is not to say I didn’t watch the reels anyway, but…I finished the book.

Thinking about the novel had me awake in the middle of the night wondering about purpose and trying to gel what I had understood about it. One comparison I can come up with is Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. In other words, Vuong’s book is written beautifully and graphically and the reader cares about the characters, but the sad fact is, nothing ever gets any better by the end. In fact, by the end, all seems hopeless. It’s a depressing novel about addiction, dementia, and depression, about class structure in the United States today, even though there’s not supposed to be one. About immigrants whose lives, full of hope upon arrival in the U.S., just get worse and worse. Painful.

Addiction is rampant. Almost every character is addicted to something that gets them through the day, whether prescription drugs, pot, heroin, whiskey. That gets hard to read as well, knowing that people all around us do the same thing. Maybe even us.

But wait, there’s more! (As the annoying TV ads say.) What is lovely and heartfelt and true about us as a people, is that every one of these flawed characters, as in Steinbeck’s novel, cares for and loves the other characters. The main character, Hai, lives with and takes care of Grazina, the elderly woman with dementia who has saved him from suicide. Hai also helps his cousin on the spectrum, Sony, who himself has helped Hai get a job at a fast-food restaurant. Workers at the restaurant help each other through a variety of fiascos. 

Particularly poignant are the scenes where Hai helps Grazina get through her WWII terrors newly fresh in her mental state by pretending to be people he is not. Sometimes it seems she is pretending so he pretends so they can get through life in general. In fact, there’s a lot of pretending going on in the novel. Sony’s mom in prison writes him letters supposedly from his father who she knows has died, but presumably he does not and thinks they are real. All of this pretending is really kindness, helping others to cope with a world that is rarely kind.

As Hai tells his cousin Sony at a troubled moment, “ Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this façade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are…They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ‘em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building…We all want some story to make it bearable so we can keep living long enough to work our asses off until we’re in the ground, like Grandma…Look, being fucked up is actually what’s most common. It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is. Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world. You’re both fucked up and you’re normal, got it?”

Kindness and loving others is what gets the reader through the novel, too. 

In a scene where the restaurant workers gather to help Sony look for his dead father and the diamond that he was told was in his father’s hand, kindness plays out: “These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kind and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt head-rest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy’s hallowed loss-on the clock.”

Kindness.

That’s what gets us all through life, others who are willing to go along with our pretenses, our ridiculous schemes, our plans that are almost certainly going to go awry. Others who join us in our passions. Others who accept us as we are.  In other words, the world is harsh, the world is crap, but other people can be Love in its purest form. 

That’s the only thing that saves this novel, the way it saves us all.