The Emperor Of Gladness By Ocean Vuong Summary Pdf

The Emperor Of Gladness By Ocean Vuong Summary

“The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.” And the book we're talking about today is The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. I picked up this book because it was an Oprah Book Club pick, and I've been meaning to read this author for quite some time. I thought maybe this would be a good jumping-off point.

So, it follows the story of this character, Hi. Hi is a 19-year-old, and you come into the story when they've maybe made some not-so-great life decisions and are standing on a bridge, looking over it. They are about to jump, and he looks over and sees this older woman on the bank of the shore over there. She's got her laundry, and her sheet gets blown away in the wind. He yells something, I think about her sheets, and then she looks over and notices him. She basically talks him down off the bridge and invites him over to her place.

He comes in and, you know, they talk. This woman is in her 80s. She lives alone in this run-down part of town where most of the other houses around are kind of abandoned. It's a very desolate place. Her name is Grazina, and her and Hi chat. She's this old Lithuanian lady, and she's like, "You know what will help to get rid of all the sorrows in the world that burden you? I have the secret. Let's go do it."

So, she takes him, and she grabs this bag of rolls. She takes them outside and starts stomping on the rolls. She's like, "Now you do it." And he starts stomping on the rolls, and the rain's coming down, and surprisingly it makes them feel, you know, just a little bit better.

They keep talking, and he ends up staying the night there because he, at this point in time, doesn't really have anywhere to go. Doesn’t know what he's going to do. As you progress in the story, you see what led him up to this point. Grazina, five years ago, had been diagnosed with mid-stage frontal lobe dementia. She takes a bunch of pills and stuff to kind of keep it at bay and whatnot. She sort of tells her story a little bit to Hi.

She's like, "What is your—your name is hello? I'm going to call you Labas. Labas means hi or hello in Lithuanian." And so she calls him Labas a lot.

After he ends up sleeping there, he wakes up in the morning. She makes breakfast. They eat breakfast. They have something like potato pancakes, and she feeds him carrots because carrots are good for the soul. You know, they give you hope. She has this whole little thing about why you should eat carrots—because it helps with your sorrows and this, that, and the other. She’s got a good heart.

She starts talking to Hi when he gets up in the morning and says something like, “You can stay with me. I know I’m older, but I need someone to stay around. It'll be like a fair trade. You can stay here for free; you take care of me.” She says, “I’ve had two nurses now who have left. The last one who was a live-in, she got married. I’m on a waiting list, so it could be another five years. I don’t know.” And she tells Hi, “You think about it.”

Hi’s just like, “Uh…” I mean, he has nowhere else to go. He was at his wit’s end and he was going to end it all, so he's like, “Yeah, I will stay here.” And so he stays.

Sometimes she goes in and out of her mind. With her dementia, it's almost like she time-travels. She goes back to a time when she was younger and sees the war and where she came from. I think she sees the deaths of her family members and her brother. Sometimes Hi becomes this character—this Sergeant Pepper—where he's trying to get them through this war that's going on around them, to get them to different destinations. She sees it—the battlefield and the chaos. So he has to try to talk her back to current reality. He'll say things like, “Okay, who's the president right now?”—just to get her to come back.

So she’s slowly slipping into this other realm inside her mind. You see the decline, which is sad. But you also see the kindness that both of them give back to each other.

At some point, her money starts to run out, and she urges Hi to maybe try and go find a job. Hi's like, "Okay, well I could go talk to my cousin. He works at the Home Market." Home Market’s kind of like Boston Chicken—or what did they change to—Boston Market? The chicken place, you know, where they had all that stuff with the sides, like Thanksgiving and whatnot.

Anyway, he hadn’t talked to his cousin in a long time because their moms had had a falling out. He goes and finds his cousin, Sony. He talks to Sony and is like, “Hey, I know we haven’t talked,” and tries to repair the rift between them. Then he finds out Sony’s mom is in jail. He’s trying to save up money to bail her out because she got in trouble. I think her nail salon—they tried to burn it down for the insurance or something? So she went to jail. I think that’s what happened. My brain’s a little foggy on the details on that, but Sony’s mom’s in jail.

Anyway, Hi ends up meeting the manager, BJ—this character Big Jean. Big Jean wants to be a wrestler, so she does some amateur wrestling stuff on the side.

The story is just—it’s about kindness. It’s about people lifting each other up even in these dark places that they get into, and just trying to survive in this life. It shows how far a little kindness can go for people. It also shines a light on addiction—whether it's with alcoholism or pills—in these small little towns.

So this is in Connecticut, just a small little town. Hi gets this job there, and you meet this cast of characters he works with. You have Moren, with her bad knees, and she drinks a little while on the job. There’s this other guy they call Russia, who works the drive-thru. He’s this skinny guy with acne, and he’s one of the strange cast of characters there. You have his cousin, and then the other guy who makes all the chickens and whatnot. They become like this found family, and they really do end up taking care of each other.

You also have the dynamic between Hi and Grazina, as he gets this job so he can help support them—help with food around the house and stuff. Then you meet some of Grazina’s family. You hear about her daughter, who was a raging alcoholic, and who she doesn’t really talk to anymore. Hi's not even sure some of these people actually exist—like, is it the dementia? Is she misremembering?

She starts talking about her son too, and then it turns out—yes, there is a son. He isn’t that far away.

I don’t want to get too spoilery into the story, but it’s sad, it’s emotional, it’s beautiful, it’s sweet, and it just shows what can happen with the ripples that go outward when people show kindness to each other. It was really beautifully written.

The first chapter—so Ocean Vuong is also a poet—the first chapter is so poetic in how it’s written. I had to go back and reread it again because it was very beautiful. Then you get into the story, and it’s not as crazy poetic as that first chapter, but that first chapter really sets the scene and the vision of it.

The story too—you see the struggles of everyday life with people living and working minimum-wage jobs. You take the small wins with what you can. It’s just a beautiful and sad story.

I see why people like this author a lot. I want to check out some of the poetry. I used to really love poetry when I was younger, but I just haven’t really delved into any of that in a long time. And really liking the way this author writes, I think I would also like their poetry—so I definitely want to check that out.

I would highly recommend this book. It’s not typically something I normally read, because I’m usually into horror or fantasy. This was more like—it’s fiction, but all the things you see are things I’ve seen within people that I know, myself, our family—stuff you see that affects everyone. Whether it's people falling on hard times, addiction, illness, health things—all of that. It’s a really great book, and I would recommend it.

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