The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like his name—only that he had been willing to toss it in the river. He had never wanted to throw his name out, just the breath attached to it.

“You believe in God, boy?” He took a long drag and considered this. “He’s probably around sometimes.”

“With money I earned by myself, I gave my daughter a room just so she can read in peace for a day. Just one day. And I sat there and watched her read, sipping a scotch from the bar. And I cried like a baby. And Lina, my little Lina, she said, ‘Mama, why you crying?’ And I said, ‘I know how God feels now.’

For a scant, luminous moment he was filled with a displaced benevolence for every soul in their tiny town. That some selfless, angelic people had the good mind to turn a burnt-down school into a home for the words I need help.

Every generation says this of itself, but these were indeed bewildering times he lived in,

You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied.

It’s like he’s aiming at pieces of the sky except he always ends up hitting a grandmother.

He aims for the mouth because it opens the way time opens—whatever goes through never returns the same. Like a word. Like a you. Like I said, this is war.

Im about tol just highlight this whole book

You gonna hold her again, like this. You’re expensive, and Jesus doesn’t let valuable things go to waste.”

Or a word existing before its definition—and like all things without meaning, it made no sense.

“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough.

“Ma,” he wanted to say, with nothing to say. “Ma, Ma, Ma.”

But don’t be afraid of life, son. Life is good when we do good things for each other.”