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.

He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light. He had not been forgiven and

thought, in losing yourself to something as natural as gravity—where one doesn’t jump but is pulled, blameless, toward the sea. If nothing else, this would hurt his mother least.

Hai wondered if anyone ever thought they’d be eating leftovers at a restaurant. Or whether they knew that the FDA allows mashed potatoes to contain up to 2 percent rat poop and up to 3.5 percent insect “fragments.” One time he spotted Maureen, out of sheer boredom, flicking a fly right onto a roasting chicken, where it sizzled and sparked before welding itself into a black nub on the crispy skin.

In Vietnam, the Americans had left the fields a ruinous wasteland with Monsanto-powered Agent Orange, not to mention the two million bodies nameless and scattered in the jungle and riverbanks waiting to be salvaged by family members hoisting woven baskets on their waists full of sun-bleached bones. On top of that the country was fighting the genocidal Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who were invading the western border. People starved, naturally, and scavenged for rats or stretched their rice rations with sawdust from lumberyards.

Two years later, by miracle or mercy, Hai and his family arrived in snow-dusted Connecticut, their faces blasted and stricken, sleeping their first weeks on the floor of the Catholic church that sponsored them, between the pews, using Bibles for pillows. He was only two and remembered none of it.

By Thanksgiving, he was out of school and back in East Gladness, slumped on his mother’s couch, New York City all but a faded dream. Even now he did not understand the chain of events that led him back to this dirty old town empty-handed.

Plus, my dad even said so. If you lie too much, everything around you starts to look like you’re drunk, like Mr. Phuong outside of A Dong Market, always talking to invisible elves. My dad knows stuff like that, classified stuff. He’s the Stonewall Jackson of the South Vietnamese Army.”

Hai wondered if he was too old to take something made for children. At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway?

He was still wearing his apron and black cap. It almost made Hai laugh to see them, two fast-food workers in a shrink’s office, like a New Yorker cartoon caption competition.

“Would you just stand in your skin with me and stay? Just for a bit, while I sort this out? Will you stay? Please? I can’t do this anymore.”