Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. I just told my son Chase, who's here, that I feel more nervous than I feel when I speak on a stage in front of 5,000 people because of the person we're speaking to today. Today we are speaking with Ocean Vuong. And my son, Chase, is here. Hello. Also. Ocean, even though we're nearing our 90th recording of We Can Do Hard Things, you are the first man we've interviewed outside of Chase's dad.
At the beginning of the year when we were dreaming up this pod, our producer Allison said to all of us, my dream is for the first man we host to be Ocean Vuong. And when I found out that you were going to come, the first person I told was my son Chase because he is the one who introduced me to your work years ago. And Chase is a very private person, so he would never have agreed to do this podcast for any other human being on Earth. So thank you.
for doing this because this is a really special day for me to have chase here too thank you and and thank you chase for for uh reading my work and you know, tending to this conversation. I'm all about mothers and sons. So this is really, really close to my heart. And thank you for being here and for sharing this space. Thank you so much. My gosh, thank you for starting the conversation. Of course.
So Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and 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. So Ocean, I mentioned that you're the first man on We Can Do Hard Things. And I just wanted to start by asking you, what does it mean to you to be a man? Oh, it's such a deep question. And I think it's one that I think I'm invested in, which is why...
I go by he, him pronouns even when I don't always feel at home in it or amongst its ranks. In one of my poems, I say, I mean it when I say I'm mostly male. And I think that's kind of my relationship with maleness and masculinity. I'm interested in complicating it. I don't think the work... is finished. in maleness Just because it's been poorly demonstrated does not mean that it's finished, that it's exhausted. It might just be beginning.
Because it's also a destination for so many, you know, masculinity as an expression is a destination for so many trans folks.
I don't want to leave it behind because I'm also concerned that those who are in charge of it or have been in power of it would sort of ruin it further you know and so I'm interested in saying what else could we salvage and rebuild here um and i and of course we can just say well forget it and just Away with it, you know, and that's valid too But I'm interested in the restraint of saying how do we use this better if at all?
We can't, for example, leave the earth behind. We have to find a way to make it better, to find new ways. um for it to nourish us so i'm interested in complicating masculinity you know and i'm seeing that already happening you know um the trend now i've noticed is for boys to wear pearls right very straight identifying um cis hat boys to to wear pearls i said oh my you know
That would be a deaf note when I was growing up for a boy to wear pearls and to do it so proudly. And so we realized that... These complex expressions of gender were already complicated by our ancestors. We go back a millennia. Everyone wore jewelry and makeup. And yet, you know, so maleness was identified in other ways. So I'm interested in kind of salvaging that.
and seeing how we can kind of have fun and complicating it, it charges us with this task of innovation. So as an artist, I feel obligated to say, Just as I don't want to throw language away. I don't want to throw all the generous expressions away because there's still something of value of use. I see myself as a junkyard artist. I'm taking an imperial language and looking for value in how I can recast it in the present. And it's no different than my work as a poet.
I feel that way about Christianity. Yes. I do. I feel like I don't want to abandon it just because I haven't aligned with its PR agents. Right, right. And we realize that the PR agents changes depending on what's trendy or who's in power. what regime is holding the purse straps, right? This happens with language too. And we ban books. We cancel various languages. Like what's happening now with the crisis and the terrible conflict in Ukraine. I think I worry that. In our powerlessness.
our helplessness, which is so um common amongst us all so um easy to empathize with you know i'm hearing like we should cancel russian literature and i think it's important that a lot of these russian writers were killed In the gulags by their own regimes and it's important to think that Regimes do not possess language. They do not possess culture. They seek to control it, but they do not own it. The language is
predates the regime and it will survive after the regime. And so conflating that gets us into murky waters and I think the same with faith. and religion that's why i think one of my heroes is thomas merton he complicated it so much he had such a wide quest for this mystical knowledge even as a trappist monk which truly really inspired me i think he's one of my most inspirational um writers and thinkers because he says where you are or who you are
ontologically as a label is only where you start. You cannot end where you begin, right? The label is not a finite container. It's a project. It's a field of knowledge, right? When I say I'm Asian American, I'm talking about a journey. I'm not talking about a checkbox.
People try to put me into a checkbox, but I'm like, I don't know what this is yet. That's right. How could you know? How could any of us know? That's right. Dr. Maya Angelou used to say when someone said to her, I'm a Christian, she would say, really? Already? That's beautiful. So does gender feel to you? Because I understand why language and the earth need to be saved.
or kept or re-understood by each person who experiences them. What is it about gender to you that feels important enough to save and also is gender something that you feel your maleness is that something that you feel inside of you like you feel like it was born in you or did does it feel like something you learned from culture I never felt
Like a male, you know, I think it was what I was put in and it's where I learned to embody myself and where I want to kind of open and widen I wanted to be more capacious and I think that's kind of my mode as an artist you know at the same time I think we don't find it useful for any one of us we can let it go and I think this is what's hard for me to wrap around with so much this thinking around control it's like you know just because it doesn't work for one of us doesn't mean
that that should be the rule for everyone. And I think this is where so many folks on the right seek to control these conversations. If gender has to be Black and white, left and right, male and female, to me, and it has to be that way for everyone else. And I think... Part of my upbringing being raised by women was that I didn't know men. I wasn't interested in it. And guess what? It didn't feel like a broken family.
Just because a father wasn't there doesn't mean that my family was fractured. I was raised by a grandmother, a mother, and two aunts. And to me, if there's enough love... Difficult love, but when there's enough love that's a complete family. And so I think for me the gender expression that I saw was what was comfortable to these women which could be different from other women you know it's culturally inflected and I think my decision to kind of stay and complicate is kind of how I approach
my art and my living as well. I don't want to flee the country because when Trump was in power, everyone wanted to leave to Canada. Some of us did. And I said, I'm an American writer. I owe it to myself, my family, my community to stay here and fight and look and see thoroughly. That's the job of the artist is to see thoroughly, keep everything accountable. Stay and complicate. Oh, I love that.
Ocean, you wrote, to be an American boy and then an American boy with a gun is to move from one end of a cage to another. Can you tell us what you meant by that, American boyhood? Growing up in New England, I think I got a close look at boyhoods of all kinds but even white hyper masculine boyhoods and I saw that what was presumed to be an identity of utmost power. We often talk about privilege, which is true.
On the other hand, I saw that it was actually destroying whiteness as well. Like white privilege wilts the wielder. And we often lose sight of that in these conversations. And I think it's important. for white folks to see that you know this thing that was constructed and hoisted on me which i the benefits of which i enjoy is also crippling me in the soul it's hurting the soul and think I realized I saw these boys in ways that their mothers and fathers don't even see them and I saw suffering
You know, and that's what they grab these guns and these weapons and these mediums of masculinity, which is often mediums of death, right? Even the way sports is performed, it's around the strategies of war. That's not to say sports are bad, it's that there are investment in them. as tied to the self-worth of maleness and masculinity is so limiting and it's so painful
When you see a boy fail to achieve that narrow, narrow slot, right? It is like moving from one side of a cage to another. There's this idea of freedom. But in fact, you're still trapped. You don't really have true freedom because your expressions of masculinity are still in the confines given to you by John Wayne. That's right. We've gone so far, quote unquote, technologically in weapons, even in medicine.
But when it comes to our spirit, we're still such a primitive culture. And in that way, it's important for me to remind America that we are so young. How can we be finished with anything? Masculinity, femininity. Anything. How can we say that we can confidently exhaust those conversations when we have just started? American is one of those words. It's a label, but it's a label we're working towards, an ongoing forever project that we can stay and complicate. That's beautiful.
Ocean, one of the reasons I just have been so looking forward to this hour is because your work is so beautifully wrapped around motherhood and sonhood. So much of your art is an exploration of your mother. She passed away. Can you tell us about your mother? Yeah, it's a challenge as an artist because for me, it's important for me to tell.
my experience of my mother but not tell her story right it's not like I don't have to write to tell her story which is why fiction and poetry is where i align and in those mediums i've created sort of a simulation that looks like my life. but it's enacted in different ways. And so, in a way, it's a conduit. It's a hologram.
of my life and my mother's life but it's not ours and so what folks read is a simulation it's a parallel universe if you will you believe in the multiverse theory i think the multiverse exists here and it exists in art
With my mother, it's an ethical line. I don't have the right to... to tell this woman's story i don't i can't possess her with language she that's her her her life and but i wanted to you know Create that interface because it's such a unique one that the idea of a single mother refugee immigrant who is absolutely traumatized by this American war brought forth by American foreign policy. And so I always say that my Americanness...
My citizenship began way before I ever arrived in this country. My Americaness began when American bombs started to fall in southern Vietnam. And that widens the scope of what America is and who gets to be American. It's not just the American dream of prosperity. It's also imperialism. And again, thoroughness. And I think I wanted to be thorough with my mother to honor her, to express this complicated relationship, but also respect and dignify her.
To me, it's the I'm very nervous of the term universal because I feel like there are things that black man or person experience it that I could never experience so I'm nervous I'm skeptical of this universal conduit that often gets thrown around particularly around literature that it's only useful if it's universal. I think it's actually useful when it's not universal.
So we can see how lives live that we've never can be empathetic with, that we've never felt and never will be. And that's actually really a great thing. The one thing that I feel is most universal is losing your mother. Watching your mother take her last breath. I think every son Will go through that or experience that loss if they're not there
or even experience the loss of someone who has mothered them, which is very specific and gendered as well. And so for me, I think death was such an incredible thing to witness because it was the closest thing I saw to truth. It's not even honest because honesty is a vehicle for truth. But death is truth without a medium. It's truth as is.
You don't get a say. You don't get to say when or how you get to experience it whether you're ready or not. And I think it changed my life watching my mother die because now I realize Everyone I see, YouTube included, it's like, you know, one day you're gonna watch.
your mother died you know and i suddenly feel so much closer to you for that chase i feel so much closer to a stranger and and on the other hand of that there are strangers who have mothers already passed and all of a sudden i feel closer to them as well and i think You know, for all this hopefulness in art of bridging gaps, I think just the reckoning with death is one of the most universal bridges that I've experienced so far. Oh yeah.
Speaking of your mother, so she came to your first reading and I think one of the stories you've told was how afterwards you came up to her and she was crying and she said, She was just so happy to see all these old white people clapping for you, just standing up and listening to you. Could you tell us about that night and maybe just what it was like to experience this mother-son relationship, particularly so tied with your work as well?
It was a special night. It happened in Hartford at the Harriet Beecher Stowe house. It was so confounded in this American moment. I didn't understand it at first. I just thought... I thought, Mom, there's more to success than just having white people celebrate you. And I'm coming from my millennial gaze. I didn't see at first why it was so important to her because I realized that These were her clients, right? They look like her clients, older white folks and her clients.
when she does nails something i think is actually an art in itself much more complicated than what i do never once have she been applauded for doing that art for 30 years. And so when her son stands up and does that, she finally gets this applaud and they were applauding her for giving birth to this poet. So she got to bask in it, but it was also equally bitter for me and bittersweet and sad because it reminded me that To get that recognition as an Asian American, you have to be exceptional.
You can't just get that as a default. You have to kind of earn your way. towards value and worth and this is what makes me really sad about what's happening with Asian women being attacked. And the centuries of objectifying our women and turning them into sex objects have dehumanized them to the point where it's almost like an extermination. Do this without any sense that there's a human being here and I think that mode of You know are you having to work?
to get to the starting line of human work. It's particularly amongst Asian Americans is something so perennial in our culture that you realize we're all behind the starting line We start in the negative and then when you're a poet When you have recognition from institutions, now you're at plus one or five or what have you, and then they applaud.
And I think this is what really affects me with the, you know, spa murders that happened two years ago. Suddenly my book sales went up. What does it feel like? to be relevant only when Asian women die. And then all of a sudden there's these media outlets. creating these book lists. Read these books and often my books are included to understand Asian representation and I think it's really fascinating. the role of empathy plays here. It's like, why do you have to read our stories?
in order to value us enough to not kill us. Why can't that value be from the default? It says a lot about the project whiteness has with empathy. That it's so far that it has to be worked on. Rather than just simply deserved, right? Why can't we just deserve? the protection. of self-worth and value. Why do you have to read eight Asian books? in order to say
Now I realize how valuable they are to us, right? So again, it's still bittersweet. So I think that moment years ago was beginning of my career. I start seeing that moment again and again in different forms. It suddenly became an allegory for how so many Asian American artists live. It's always bittersweet. You're celebrated when people die. You're celebrated only in these lists where it's just curated towards a specific goal.
And then it's over, right? Until another killing spree happens. And I think that is a sad moment for any writer. And I think... It's difficult, especially for the children of Asian parents or young folks like you, Chase, who are Asian yourself. You realize my goodness, you know, is my only way to traffic in the world, is my only way of being recognized, is when I'm in pain. what does that feel like you know to be to be valuable or deserving of of empathy and love only when you're brutalized
That's kind of like the Asian American plight. If we're visible at all, we're visible as a corpse. You say, Ocean, that your mother's advice about how to survive as an Asian boy in America was to disappear, to be invisible, to not stand out, because you already had one strike against you, being Vietnamese. It seems she was trying to protect you from racism by warning you ahead of time and trying to tell you to stay small so you'd be a smaller target.
I think about that all the time, every day now. Because like your mom, I raised an Asian boy, a Japanese boy in America. And recently, only recently, he bravely shared with me a truth of his childhood, which is that I did not warn him nor protect him at all. I looked at him every day of my life and his life. And I just assumed somehow, subconsciously, that my whiteness was his whiteness and would protect him without him having to learn to protect himself.
But it didn't. He dealt with racism in every school and every town we've ever lived in, but he just dealt with it alone. Because he didn't have a guide like your mother. who understood it. You say in every mixed-race family, things are complicated, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, Chase, how did you feel about that? How did you navigate that? I'm interested in your perspective here.
It's very interesting. I'm only a quarter Japanese, so sometimes I do some self-gaslighting and wondering how much I've actually experienced. And so there's that, which is, of course, also very complicated. But I don't know. It's really interesting, I think. There was a lot of forgetting in our family with just assimilation, which I feel like is something that is...
essentially like not pursuable in the end. I just remember like very subtle playground stuff that would kind of be repressed and then would come up in certain memories and then I would remember, oh, that was racist or that was a violent act. Actually, only really recently have I, I think, given myself the space to understand that fully. Definitely from reading your work, but also just... with the recent research in that. violence against Asian people and especially Asian women.
It's very interesting to deal with that latency period between something that happened to you, which of course still continues, but then realizing that that has stuck with you for such a long time without you really dealing with it or even giving yourself the grace to process it. right right that's really courageous to kind of unpack a lot of that And I think you're right. The body, you know, it holds so much. It knows so much more. The subliminal mind knows so much more than we do.
I think it comes down to... how Asian symbols on the body are represented and has to do with passing. And if I saw you on the street, I would see an Asian person. And I think that's... So much of that is out of our control. It's out of our realm of understanding, which is why, you know, the protection, that mantra is so important because My mother was anticipating how the world would see me. And she taught me vigilance.
she says that you can tell if someone respects you just by the way they look at you when you enter a store and i would go into a store and i was an innocent kid but my mother says the clerk is not liking us here this is not let's hurry up and get out you know they're they're unfriendly and this this hyper vigilance um became actually a praxis, a way to be an artist. Again, I'm turning these limitations into assets, but how sad and exhausting to live your life.
and constantly have to see if you're wanted in any certain space space that you have the right to be in and i think this is that the most prominent issue when we talk about white privilege. Because people get really nervous around that. They say, well, there's poor whites too. And it's not about economics only. It's about access to space. It's about the advantage of... being anywhere in this country and being legible as a human being, which was certainly not possible for Ahmaud Arbery.
who couldn't run in a certain space. He was not legible as a jogger. And lost his life for it. And, you know, I saw this happen again and again. in stores where my mother would go into in the mall she would pick something up and a clerk would say oh that's too expensive for you And you don't think much of it, like, you know, as a kid. But then looking back, I said, what did that? And my mother would just say, oh, I'm so sorry. Just an issue. We would be completely out of there.
What does that mean when it happens again and again, that you realize that your face predetermines? where you can go. Even now, when I was doing research on my novel, researching Melville, I went to the Pittsfield library in Pittsfield, Massachusetts where Melville's artifacts are stored. And there's a little private room where you can request to view his cigar boxes and his boots and his desk.
And I was interested in, I was a professor at the time, still am at UMass. And I went and I asked the clerk, you know, a white woman. And I was with my partner, who's a white man. He drives. I can't drive. So I needed him to get there. So we walked up to the desk together. And I said, ma'am, can I get the keys, you know, and look at Melville's artifacts? And she looked at us. Then she looked at my partner and she says, you know, you can't tutor him in there.
And so it's it's this Yes, I'm a quote-unquote. famous author but under what stage right you know in what context because if i'm out in the world i'm just a chink And that's the majority of my life. In very carefully selected, there has to be an event, a brochure. an email blast, a bio, an introducer. And then I'm okay. I'm guarded by my prestige because America, it doesn't, you know, seeing an ocean bomb.
it turns out doesn't solve anti-asian racism it only says well he's the exceptional exception But when I leave this event, I'm going to see everyone else the same way. Right. And so I'm going to go back to the default. And when I walked up to that counter without an introduction, without a bio.
i'm the default right and and it just knocks you down and and that's nothing compared to what you know so many of us experience and it also helped me because i didn't ruin my day you know we always talk about microaggressions but we also have to say that there's so much strength
in what my mother taught me i was like okay of course you would say that you know and i just i just i became i was invincible you know i was like all right well just hurry up and let me get in so i can do my work you know and and I wasn't traumatized. I think it's important for me too, being raised by women who survived war, to remind myself that not all suffering equals trauma. Right? There's no way. Some of us experience difficulties. and at certain points, however, not all of it.
is an immediate transference to trauma. How we decide to live, we still have so much control over. We could be victims of racism, victims of war, victims of domestic violence, as my mother was.
But whether we lived in victimhood or not, it's up to us. And I never saw my mother live as a victim. It's the most powerful thing to this day. It's such a... I get so emotional thinking about it because I think how could she not She experienced so many things that are worse than what I experienced, but I never ever saw her consider herself a victim.
she treated everybody one at a time and every day it was like a new start for her every day was like a blank page and I think I embody that when I write you know a lot of people ask me Ocean, how are you so vulnerable in your work? It must be so hard. And I almost feel guilty. I said, it's not hard. I've watched these women embody that every single day, and I'm sitting at a desk, relatively safe, in a quiet room with a sheet of paper. This is my job. I chose to quest.
into the deep mysteries and the deep brightness and the darkness of being a human being. This is what I signed up for. I'm gonna dig. going to be vulnerable i have to but it's nothing compared to what they experience You decided not to disappear. It's amazing that all of this protection warning about disappearing and then you become an artist which is sort of all about appearing. You said it is so easy.
For a small yellow child to vanish the real work is to be known and one of the best ways to be known is to be an artist. Can you talk to us about art as a way to exist and to insist on appearing? I became an artist out of limitations. I started at business school and I dropped out so I was a I was a failure, which is how many artists begin. Often how we live every day. We live in failure. We're used to it. I mean, it's all about rejection.
you know we have to master no to get to your yes that's the way every artist lives and And so, you know, I couldn't do much else. I didn't really have the attention span to work a minial job. I did all that. I worked in fast food. I worked in cafes. I worked in tobacco farms. And so being an artist was the only place where I really thrived. And not everybody can get a life doing it, you know, but I gave it my all. I told my mother, I said,
Okay, I'm sorry that I dropped out of business school. I can't do it. If I'm going to learn to lie, I want to lie in my arms. And I said, I told her, I said, give me a chance, you know, give me a chance to two years. That's all I'll do. I'm going to treat this as a job. I'm gonna go to the library and just write and read and if I can get a lifeline within two years
I'll keep it up. And if I don't, I'll go back to school and get a degree in education and be an elementary school teacher or something, or work in a nail salon. And so for me, it's so important to be... an Asian American artist because When it comes to Asian American prodigy or talent, were often perceived as conduits. You know, the math whiz or the musical prodigy, you know, holding the violin to play Eurocentric masters, Bach, Beethoven.
But when you decide to make your own story, when you become a painter, a screenwriter, a musician, which is happening now, you know, Japanese Breakfast, Mitsuki. And I think that... a lot of folks don't have an uneasy relationship with someone like Mitski who is so bold and powerful and unapologetic and immediately we would be received with pretentious
too hard, too cold, right? And it's like we're supposed to be accommodating. This has to do with how Asian Americans are expected to perform in the culture. We're supposed to open the door. you know how many times have I've eaten in a Vietnamese restaurant went to the bathroom and on the way back a white table would turn to me and say excuse me you know can you get me a glass of water and it's like again
What is legible in this body? So to be an Asian American artist you're up against hundreds of years of erasure so when you come behind the curtain and say i'm not here to make any cuisine i'm not here to sew anybody's pants i'm not even here to open the door for you i'm here because i have thought and I have things to say and I have things to contribute in ways that tie me to the endeavor, the very American tradition of making.
people are going to see you as inconceivable but that's okay it's important it's probably the most important thing that we can do right now and so it's a hard journey I don't know if I recommend it, but I think to me, if art making satisfies you and gives you pleasure,
You should follow it until it's unfeasible economically. I'm not going to say be poor to be an artist. I don't want to romanticize that. I've been there. I've eaten ramen noodles out of upturned frisbee discs you know it's been bad right um so i don't want to romanticize that i say if it gives you pleasure do it if it doesn't you can do something else but just know that
There's a beautiful hill to climb when it comes to being an Asian American artist. But when you get there, you'll find your people. Like we're finding each other now because I'm an artist. That's an incredible thing to do when you make it. And there's more of us here now, right? There's elders with their hands extended. It's a deep honor to me to be a part of that, to have people look up to me. I don't see that as a burden at all. It's a great joy.
And just in the lens of Asian American artists too, I just would not be able to live with myself if I didn't say like the work that you and also just the new resurgence. And you mentioned Mitski, which is so ridiculous that you mentioned Mitski. Like that's, that's so crazy. I just, i love her yeah japanese breakfast sasami like all these new artists that are coming in and um being so inconceivable with their art it's just really working and i can only really speak to my circle but
all of my Asian American friends and even beyond that we feel very seen by all these people being not universal but incredibly specific with their stories. Of course we've all had completely converse experiences. My ancestors were Japanese, they were colonizers. There's no similarity, but there also is, being in America, this homogenous treatment.
like learning from these artists who are telling their stories that kind of make our identities which are messy and new like incredibly conceivable. So I just wanted to say like The effect that this work is having, however incredibly radical it is and incredibly new, it's like... 100% working to fuel this new young people generation. We're very thankful. Thank you for saying that. You put it absolutely aptly. I think that's exactly what's happening.
Ocean, the way that you do write about and around your mother is so beautiful and so honest and there was so much love and beauty and power and there was also some abuse. You say of the women in your family, the poison of war entered them, they passed it down to me. You also, I've heard you say in an interview, not in your writing, I don't think, but this is our species-wide endeavor. How do we change what happened to us into how we live better?
So we were all raised, everyone on this couch has been raised by beautiful imperfect mothers and every mother is parenting imperfectly so how do we use this to live better how do we move beyond anger, how do we find forgiveness, resolution, peace, power? How do we work together on this species-wide endeavor? I think the seeking to understand where our loved one's pain comes from.
Maybe that's the thesis of all of my work. Where does pain come from? And I think when you ask that question the answers that you get, and you'll probably get many answers at many stages in your quest to answer that question, you start to realize that the complexity of the various violences we experience with our mothers or other wives come from them being hurt.
and come from systems that began way before they were even born that they were up against so much and I think it doesn't erase the harm that we've experienced, but it throws it into context and it amplifies them as people who tried their best. It's actually really beautiful in retrospect to see that Every mother had their limit, which actually renders them human.
because the the problem of how we write about motherhood is that it's often abstracted into these tropes and stereotypes right the doting mother the obsessed mother the tiger mom like nobody talks about the trope of the tiger mom as something seated in the anxiety of failing in a country where you've seen your parents starve when you see your village burn to death
So it's like, where does these trauma responses come from? They come from the quest towards care. It's sort of misguided, or in Buddhism we call it unskillful. Rather than bad, we say this is unskillful care. This is an unskillful expression of love. it's hard to come to that moment to say, well, how is my abuse an unskillful expression, right? And I can't speak for others, but for me, I saw that the violence in my mother was an expression of her powerlessness.
She had no agency as a person, as a woman, in her relationships with men, in her relationship with the world, with society, at her job. And so, you know, it just exploded out of this frustration. And it's always around her frustration was always a desire to make me better. to protect me. It sounds so antithetical, but that's what trauma is. Trauma doesn't make sense.
It should never make sense. When we think about PTSD, we're talking about people who are displaced in memory. They are acting as if. the danger is around the corner, even when they're in relative safety. This happens is true with survivors of domestic violence. It's true with refugees and veterans. If you think about the veterans' hypervigilance and paranoia,
They're thinking. She's thinking in the war zone. And if there is a war zone, it would probably serve her. And I think that's important too, where I think of a lot of the Holocaust scholars.
trying to reorient what we think about epigenetic trauma as something also akin to epigenetic strength like it wasn't just the passing of trauma or baggage or suffering it was the passing of strength right vigilance even paranoia this desire to control my mother would before she went to the DMV for example she would prepare days in advance
The paper, the files, the money, cash to slip whatever guard that was, you know, giving her problems. Like, she prepared to go to the DMV like she was preparing for war. On one hand, it's really sad to see. But I saw that, oh, this is a skill. For so much unskilled love, there's skill here. There's innovation here. There's survival. Nobody survives by accident. nobody survives by accident survival is a creative app
Yes, it is. So your newest poetry book is called Time is the Mother. We have it right here. Can you tell us a bit about what that title means? It feels like it could contain multitudes. thank you thank you for the whitman nod um I hope everything I do contains more than one thing. I think this is where my practice is most queer. Where I don't want Any sentence I write to mean one thing, it should mean it should be a fork.
which is antithetical to the project of the sentence. The sentence many linguists call it a patriarchal tool because it's so finite, it's linear in form, and it arrives at a period. And I think so we're taking this very linear form and turning it into a fork in the road. Turning it into a multiplicity. And time as a mother is similar, right? And I think I like to be subversive and to seek alterity in my work, right? What else? I'm not always interested in opposition. Because opposition...
You know, the theory of opposition is that we're always fighting and opposing the dominant force, which means we can't have room for ourselves. We're always holding up the wall, the roof that's collapsing. Call it whatever you want. Hegemony, imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy. But we're holding it up. And then what else can we do? How do we make anything? And we're just spending all of our energy holding up the roof.
from collapsing on us for me i'm interested in alterity what happens if i let go of that roof right there's a great risk because it could fall on you. But what would I do? What can I make? And while I can't always let go of that roof in my body, in life in real time because the world is its own you know a machine of a destruction and power i can let go in my work the work is kind of this This, again, this simulation, this virtual reality based on reality.
the poem and language is so important to me because it's a time where i get to drop my hands and make something on my own account something that you know white men for so long just got to do they got to write about going on safari, write about having affairs in, you know, the suburb, the mid-century American, the male novel was full of this. And it has such the privilege of choice and luxury. That title has to mean multiple things. And so for me, it's like, you know.
time is a mother and underneath that is the word time is a month and it's and I really love that because I love it when in our lexicon, we often say that, right? Oh, that storm was a mother. And in Vietnamese, A similar thing happens, where we say, instead of 老妈, which is motherfucker, we say, often, we say...
Right. Like mother. Because something is interesting because I think we realize that we don't want to say that word. We want to just signal it as a meaning, but we don't want to articulate. that horrible line, right? We don't really mean it, but we're using it as a way to code and to kind of color, you know, what's happening, right? This idea.
of destruction and damage which i really respect i said oh it's interesting that both cultures rarely are related but in this case you know the american lexicon and the vietnamese lexicon can't stomach saying that. So I think that's really beautiful to kind of stop short and let the silence finish. Something you don't want to say so writing is as much about making as it is about leaving space for the imagination and also I wanted to have this large disagreement with the trope of father time.
Father time waits for no one and I never felt that time to me resembled a father. To me it was a mother because it gives birth to all things. The present is a capacious moment. The present mothers us. Every moment in the present is the womb holding life. So to me, time is more mother than probably anything I've ever known. And so I, you know, it took me three books to have to curve it.
to have a statement like that right out of the gate and i really had to kind of burn my stripes to be able to be confident enough in my work to say this is my thesis this is how i feel I've heard you talk about the title on Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous. Can you just tell us why you chose that line as the title? Oh, there's so many reasons. But, you know, I think often when we think about Asian-ness,
It's tied to femininity. When we think about femininity, it's tied to beauty being merely decorous. In other words, There's purple flowery prose, and then there's meat and potato prose, right? And we see how those are so gendered, right? And so the purple prose is frivolous. decorous extra we can do without it but god forbid if we didn't have meat and potatoes you know laconic
steely prose, that we wouldn't have anything. And I wanted to shift that conversation and realize that there's so much gendered ways that we value things even in literature even in a phrase so for me it's like it's so important to have that statement that
we are beautiful even if it's brief even you know being beautiful for your whole life your whole life relative to the rest of the human history is a blip it's a it's a brief thing but it's Everything it's substantial to to center beauty and I think the most radical thing we can do with Asian American art, but even around conversation of gender, non-binariness, and queerness is frivolousness. What if queerness is just for nothing?
What if we put down our hands, holding up this wall that's crushing us? And for a moment, what would we do? Would we just clap for ourselves?
right and so for me that title is just a moment of me just clapping I just want to I don't know how I'm going to say this because I wasn't planning to say this but I'm thinking about the years before Chase and I had had conversations about what it was like for him to be Japanese in the world and to be the only non-white passing person in our family and to be queer before we had talked about him being queer or me being queer and him having all of your books.
i mean i'm picturing him reading over and over again on earth were briefly gorgeous and your first book of poetry Exit Sky with Exit Wounds. And I'm just thinking about him reading those books and handing them to me. And I just want to thank you because I know that you were mothering him. during that time that your work was mothering him and showing him who he was and what he could be and all of the beauty of him and so thank you for that.
Thank you. Thank you so much for saying that. And here's to more queer mothers of all kinds. That's right. And I do also just want to say that I will, you mentioned in the beginning that at some point Chase will lose me. When I am dying and you are saying goodbye to me, I will be remembering this hour. Wow. This will be something that I will remember. It's big. Together in our last moments, Ocean.
Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a deep honor and thank you for having me. Absolutely. It's such an honor. We can do hard things and we'll see you back next time. if this podcast means something to you it would mean so much to us If you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?
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