There are three kinds of family, muses the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong. There’s the nuclear family, “which often we talk about as the central tenet of American life”. There’s the chosen family, “the pushback”, the community and friendships built by people who have been rejected by their parents, often because of their sexuality or gender identity. And then there’s the family we talk about much less frequently, but spend most of our waking hours within – our colleagues, or what Vuong describes as “the circumstantial family around labour”.
Vuong’s forthcoming second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, encompasses them all. There’s its 19-year‑old hero Hai’s relationship with his mother, a poor Vietnamese immigrant who believes that he has fulfilled her desperate aspirations for him by going to university, when he has actually gone to rehab. (Vuong, who also struggled with drug addiction, didn’t dare tell his mother when he dropped out of a marketing course at Pace University in New York, before getting on to the English literature course at Brooklyn College that set the course for his life as a writer.) The core of the book is Hai’s relationship with Grazina, an elderly widow from Lithuania who has dementia, and who takes him in when she sees him about to throw himself off a bridge in despair. Then there are the eccentric and richly drawn staff members of HomeMarket, the fast food restaurant in which Hai works, with its manager who is an aspiring wrestler, and customers ranging from the snotty and entitled to the homeless and desperate.
