ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
In his new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness," Ocean Vuong describes characters who work together in a Connecticut fast food restaurant as people bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen...
OCEAN VUONG: Bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory - the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast food joint, designed by a corporate architect so that they would come to know the sound of each other's coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones.
SHAPIRO: Vuong worked in fast food, and "The Emperor Of Gladness" is partly a love letter to these workers.
VUONG: I think they are Americans who dream. You know, I think I'm more interested in Americans who dream than I am in the American dream, because when you reframe that, you reframe the American dream as something around Americans who dream. You get to see them as individuals, and you realize there is no monolith to this place that we live in. It's so large, most of us don't even really know how other parts of us live.
But when you look at people who work in a fast food restaurant, you realize that no matter how different their ideologies are - and there were vastly different ideologies where I worked - kinetic kinship degrades and corrodes those ideologies. It's really hard to hate somebody when you need them to finish the shift with you, when you start to see them sweat in the third or fourth hour - and you see the sweat glistening on the locket that they have around their neck, how it opens to the picture of their grandmother, who they love dearly. It made a big impact on me as a person to know that human relationships will always outpace ideological polemics.
SHAPIRO: You know, my grandfather made my mother work in a factory for a summer because he wanted her to have that experience, which to me always seemed a little cruel. And you're making me see it in a different light, that there may have been a gift he gave her beyond the knowledge of hard, repetitive work that goes to what you're describing right now.
VUONG: Yes. You know, I can't speak for your grandfather, but I think you realize that everything you do has a price. It has a cost, every action you take. You know, fast food workers, their humanity is often obfuscated. They are valued only for their hands, what they can do with their hands. But they are some of the most - I've seen some of the greatest problem-solving and innovation in a fast food restaurant. I've seen a chicken thigh taped to a freezer to keep it open.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
VUONG: You know, like, and it's like (laughter), I'll never forget it. And it's like, that's a perfect way to solve that, because there was nothing else that would keep it open just enough so we can go in and out.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
VUONG: And to me, these are - they're survival artists.
SHAPIRO: You're reminding me to mention that this book also has a tremendous sense of humor. There are moments that made me laugh out loud in the midst of the beauty and the pain and the epic sweep of these individual lives. There are just absurd, hilarious sequences.
VUONG: I think you realize that you have to laugh in order to not cry. And I think when you know that you're going into this little box of a restaurant and you're going to be with six or seven people for the next eight hours, it's almost like a sonnet. You know, the sonnet has been accredited to being one of the most innovative forms of Anglophonic poetry because of its restrictions. It demands - you can't veer too far, so you have to innovate inward. And that's what the shift was to me, is that I knew that I could not turn away from these people, regardless of how I feel about them. So I needed to build a relationship that would help us survive, and part of that is humor. You know, the immense amount of humor and the absurdity of living the modern life and showcasing that freely was how we got through some of those brutal, brutal shifts.
SHAPIRO: Ocean Vuong's new novel is "The Emperor Of Gladness." Thank you so much.
VUONG: Thank you so much, Ari. It's an honor.
(SOUNDBITE OF JESSE COOK'S "AFTERNOON AT SATIE'S")
SHAPIRO: And you can hear yesterday's conversation with Ocean Vuong, including what his mother, grandmother and aunts taught him about the capacity for wonder, at npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF JESSE COOK'S "AFTERNOON AT SATIE'S") Transcript provided by ½ûÂþÌìÌÃ, Copyright ½ûÂþÌìÌÃ.
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