The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

outskirts of East Gladness.

Before long the HomeMarket off Cumberland Lane appeared.

Sony was named after the Sony Trinitron, the first TV his father bought once he arrived in America after being released from a reeducation camp back in Vietnam.

BMW. One kid from the same refugee camp as Hai’s family was called MJKarlMalone Truong; rivals in life, Jordan and Malone would be united in the body of an asthmatic Vietnamese boy with a lazy eye who landed, of all places, in North Carolina, home of Jordan’s Tar Heels.

It was the kind of day where anything felt possible. As if the charity of the world had tipped,

finally, to one side of the rusted scale.

The kind of day where you can fill in your scars with Magic Marker and tell yourself you’re n...

“You gotta start at the asshole of things before you can get to the heart. That’s what BJ always says. And it’s true.”

Even Denny’s, which some people got the nerve to call a sit-down restaurant, has a goddamn microwave. Have you ever seen a microwave in this establishment?”

counter. BJ picked one up, held it to the light,

then gingerly broke it in half. A puff of steam exhaled from the bread as yellow crumbs flaked onto her palm. She held one half to Hai’s lips and said, “Go ahead and taste this truth, friend.”

communion

He took another bite as the faces around him warped into watery colors and felt granted into a realm much greater than his sad, little life, which made his troubles seem suddenly ethereal and elsewhere.

Only when BJ gave Hai a playful shove did he realize it was her voice he was hearing, her fingers jabbing at his chest as she lip-synched through the track. When she finished, his face—only a foot away in the tiny office—was soaked with spit.

very confusing

“Hmm, I could be your father,” she nodded to herself. “I’ll be thirty-seven in March.” “Okay,” he said.

A week after Noah’s funeral, Hai found the book at the bottom of his laundry basket and tossed it in the trash, the bookmark just two chapters

How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still

somebody’s son.

as BJ said, “There’s nothing Thanksgiving about stale coffee.”

At HomeMarket, “made by hand” meant heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked

nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum-sealed in industrial resin sacks. 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.”

Maureen combined her creamed spinach with the sweet potato pie and swore by it—though she was alone on that one. And whenever a tray

came back—wrong order, mashed potatoes cold, green beans too mushy—you could take the whole thing and eat it in the walk-in fridge, standing there shoveling the slop in your mouth in under five minutes while a bulb flickers over your head.

She once dropped a tray of meat loaf and shouted, “Ohfuckthreedicksinabasket!” to which a

man in a baby-blue turtleneck yelped and spat out his mashed potatoes.

He worked the drive-thru, which meant he’d walk around mumbling to himself, then shout “I SAID, DO YOU WANT KETCHUP?” at the top of his lungs every half hour or so. There was

There were times, too, when people were just people, which meant they were assholes.

loud enough for Wayne to hear, “They would have a black dude roasting chicken.”

“My father taught me this work.” He said this softly but his bottom lip was quivering. “And he learned it from his own dad down in Carolina. And his dad before that. They were pitmasters. Now I’m no master, but this is their work. And I get to do it.” He pointed so hard at his heart it left a greasy period on his apron. “I don’t even have a photo of my granddad but I got this, you understand?” He glanced at each of their faces. “So nobody’s getting me off this stupid-ass chicken line.”

He had overheard Wayne mention that out of every five hundred soldiers, there were most likely ten mass shooters.

When he was younger Hai had wanted a bigger life.

Instead he got the life that won’t let him go.

After high school, he got into college—the first in his family to do

at Pace University in New York, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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.

“What, like level thirteen of Tetris?” he said, chewing. “You’ve been stuck on level thirteen for over a year.” “Because I have work.” She stood, fuming. “I work for us. Just me. Alone. Remember?”

“I got into an MD program at this university in Boston,” he told her, his chin high, expectant. Ma held the page with both hands, as if it emitted its own light. “You’re not on drugs right now?”

“I know this won’t be like last time, okay?” his mother

said, wincing.

Because it didn’t. It meant nothing because Boston meant nothing. Because there was no medical school—not even an application. How could there be? He didn’t even have a

bachelor’s to his name.

a group of skateboarders were throwing

New Hope Recovery Center.

The first person Hai saw OD was somebody’s dad.

Every generation says this of itself, but these were indeed bewildering times he lived in, a time before iPhones were everywhere, and people still looked up as they walked, their heads filled with self-generated thoughts floating up from deep pits in the subconscious.

your dopamine levels higher for not having been depleted from blue-light screens throughout the day.

Those were the times, those who lived through it would say, years later, not knowing what it was they meant.

it, Fugazi’s “Waiting Room”

He hung up before she could finish and sat staring at the laminated chart pinned to the cork wall: 7-Step Guide to Discussing Your Addiction with Loved Ones. Underneath it, taped to the wall and decorated with clip-art flowers, was a piece of paper printed with the Mary Oliver quote hung on nearly every spare surface in the rehab—the communal fridge, the microwave, bathroom stalls, even the broken fire alarm by the detox, its ubiquity now lending it a wry, mocking tone: Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Inside those wide white hours, he often asked himself why he had deceived his mother in the first place. In the end, there was no good answer—only