The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

“Let me guess,” Maureen said, smirking as she crossed her arms, “you got a Prince Albert.” “How the hell am I supposed to get that, Maur? No, man. Do I look like a penis ring person to you?” “I thought a Prince Albert was a type of tattoo!”

And you know wrestling is ninety percent music, right?”

The Peace Treaty, Maureen told Hai as they sat on milk crates in the freezer, a slab of frozen mac and cheese balanced across her knees, was a food exchange between HomeMarket and the employees at their arch rival, the Panetta down the road in Millsap.

Panetta pls

Back in high school, Panetta was the place where rich girls from “the Heights,” wearing a uniform of Abercrombie sweatpants tucked into Ugg boots and puffer vests, would sit in a booth, look at you while sipping cantaloupe ice tea, then whisper to each other before erupting with toothy laughter.

“their food is shit. Fealthy is what I call it. Fake healthy. They cut up two stalks of romaine, toss it into a bowl of mayo covered in bacon bits, and call it ‘conscious crisps.’ Don’t that make you wanna punch a toddler?”

Some of our leaders are even lizards in disguise. I mean, how else do you explain Dick Cheney?

Wasn’t that how taxes worked? Aren’t we alive just so they can skim our earnings off the top for as long as we live?

“The big man upstairs took him home in ’99. Leukemia. Bad blood, they said. Funny thing is his deadbeat father always said that too. That my boy had bad blood. But he was talking about me. That he had my temper in him, which was true. Then my baby went ahead and really did have bad blood. What a joke.”

“Flat white at the register!” another worker shouted, setting a drink on the counter. “What the hell did you just call me?” Maureen said.

She was waving her arms around and raging out, which he learned at New Hope can happen with Narcan.

“The reason why it’s so good,” she lifted her head, “is because it’s a lie. And incredible things can come out of lies. Just ask good ole Uncle Sam.”

“Once you realize they’ve lied to you, you lose faith in their fucked-up systems. Searching for another purpose, you start to root for outsiders. Underdogs. But then you realize the underdogs are nowhere to be found, the media has hidden them from you, the prisons and madhouses have locked them up, so you think you’re the only one out there losing your mind when in fact there are many like you, trapped in this supposedly free world of work and sleep and endless fucking cakes.”

The crew didn’t believe they were saving anyone from anything—but each of them was filled with a rare and unnameable pride just to hear him say it.

“I was pretty once, you know. But what can you do?”

“I would’ve helped,” Hai said. “I don’t care if our moms are fighting. We’re cousins. Just tell me next time.” “You never helped before. How would I know you would now?”

“It’s not so hard to kill,” Grazina said sleepily when a Confederate soldier was impaled by a bayonet as he ran up a tree-lined hill. “You just touch something until its color changes.”

Girl 😭

It was such an odd thing to say that Hai bent over to check on her. “Grazina,” he whispered. “What?” “Who’s the president?” She pointed at the TV. “Lincoln.” It was good enough.

LOL

“The South always loses. That’s the rule.” “As they should. They were, like, huge dicks. Look.” Hai gestured at the screen. “They walked across this big-ass field and got shot up just to keep slavery going.”

Then Sony said something, just under his breath, either to Hai or to just give it to the air, he couldn’t tell. “Why do I feel so terribly sad?” That was it.

“Okay, let me look for a bathroom,” Hai tells her in Vietnamese. Before he could take a step further, she grabs a lidded earthenware pot from a wall shelf, clearly an antique, and puts it on the floor. “Bà ngoại!” Sony squeals as Bà ngoại squats over the pot, the sound of dribbling filling the room, and faces the boys, her eyes shut with relief.

NO

“Get me that towel!” Bà ngoại says. Hai hands her an embroidered cloth hanging on a rocking chair. She cleans herself, tosses the rag in the pot, and closes the lid.

Oh good god

It was Thanksgiving Day in East Gladness and Bà ngoại was long gone, along with that summer day so many years ago. But Hai whispered it anyway: “Happy birthday, Sony.”

I still do it now—seventeen and still drawing on my sheets.” She chuckled, then shyly looked away. “No, wait. What about Labas? Labas, remember? You’re not seventeen. You’re eighty-two.”

Shit

“Jonas left this for me before he went to God. He knew it would come in handy on a journey like this. Use it to take us to London, Sergeant.

Oh the timelines are so twisted now

“Rob was one of those guys that was addicted to war, you know?” “Addicted?” “You know, those guys who can’t get right once they come home, so they keep going back for another tour. To feel camaraderie or some shit. Rob was one of them.

Can camaraderie—the bond of working in unison—be enough to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face,

Im really screaming rn

“Fuck ’em. The Feds just want free oil,” Russia said. “But those boots are sick, though, no lie.” Russia pointed with his chin at the soggy leather wrapped around Hai’s feet. “Shit, I might get my skinny ass drafted just to get a pair.”

He had imagined these nurses would end up hardened from seeing endless hordes of ravaged human forms whose warped faces upon closer inspection often revealed a neighbor or a friend, but Marylyn was tender with him, with herself. This is her special thing, he decided: to send people home—whatever that meant.

A nineteen-year-old who still reads must be dumb enough to willingly refuse the wide-open book-free utopia of adulthood.

“Well, have you been practicing?” Hai asked, snapping shut the case with the pills inside. “Heard the Celtics could use a Cuban with a beer belly in his late thirties to make layups. With finesse.”

How rare to see one’s mother lost in such unfixed and unknowable contentment, so privately realized through a scarce, snatched freedom.

How could he do this now? How could he go to the back door and knock—only to have her see him like this? How could he put an end, in a few short steps, to this version of his mother he’d never seen and yet had wanted, his whole life, to witness? And perhaps most sickening, how could he do it a second time?

“I’m sorry your investment didn’t pay off. I didn’t know raising children was like throwing dice at a casino.”

“Fuck you. I scrub feet so we can have this shitty apartment. You think I like bowing my head to white people like they were gods twenty times a day?”

he took in this view one last time before turning from the window, and headed back down the road, away from the dead end, until he cut clear through town, until the upper beams of King Philip’s Bridge rose over the outskirts, which led him to stand, only minutes later, under its rail ties, and now he was here, in this house where Grazina was sleeping just a few feet away, and he was still in possession of his one wild and precious life.

They already handled raw chicken at the store—how bad could pork be, the other white meat?

Lmao

“But it’s not what people think they’re getting.” These “people” included Linda McMahon—co-founder of WWE—who was currently running as a Republican for a Connecticut Senate seat.

Oh good can't escape her

She was rumored to have ordered thirty of these hogs for a Christmas fundraiser she was hosting at her mansion in Stamford, where wrestling superstars were supposed to attend. “You know,” said Wayne with a chuckle, “for some reason I can’t imagine the Undertaker sitting down and cutting into a pork chop with a napkin tucked into his leather trench coat.”

People love eating meat but they don’t have a damn clue what it’s about. It’s alive. That means blood, piss, and shit.”

I know the sound of a kid lying out his ass even if I don’t speak Chinese.” “Vietnamese.”

Hai realized, for the first time, in the smoky light that made Russia’s blue hair tinge silver with sweat, that the boy was handsome—but in the way that reveals itself only after you know a person for a while, the way a doorknob is polished to brilliance with use. Hai now found his buckteeth endearing,

Down bad rip

And that’s how Christianity came to Japan. Through pork.

I too can be convinced to do things through good pork

“If being called an emperor meant getting your throat cut in the name of Christ, then you can go ahead and call me a peasant,” Russia said.

If Wayne hadn’t been counting on them to get that bonus, Hai would’ve walked right down the road and hitchhiked back to East Gladness soon as he saw their faces. But what could he do? He was part of a team, and that meant something, didn’t it?

In the end, the butchers wouldn’t make the quota anyway; the promised bonus would never come.

This would be my final straw 13th reason etc

It will only occur to Hai, years later, when his grandmother is long dead, how easy it was for them to laugh, that it was almost a superpower, to crack up with faces so open they seemed on the verge of falling apart, and to do so without a touch of shame in a parking lot on the side of a highway

At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway?

BJ paced back and forth behind the counter as the bass raged on, the sight of their manager performing heavy metal behind the station where green beans and creamed spinach were usually served seemed conjured from a fever dream.

“We might be beautiful, but it doesn’t matter when we’re losers. We’re short losers. Beautiful, short losers. And that doesn’t do anything for anybody.”

“When I was little,” Sony shook his head at the stars, “whenever I was having a bad day, he’d take my finger and run it over the hard bumps on his hand and say, ‘Your daddy’s made of diamonds, son. You don’t have a three-star-general dad. You have a diamond-general dad.’ That would always make me feel better.”