When he was 2 years old, Ocean Vuong's family immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. He tells NPR's Michel Martin that he didn't learn to read English until he was 11. Now 27, he's making his mark in the world of poetry.
Vuong is the 2016 winner of the Whiting Award for poetry and published a new book of poems called Night Sky with Exit Wounds, weaving his personal stories of growing up with his family memories of life in Vietnam.
His poem "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" was published last year in The New Yorker:
Interview Highlights
On his mother naming him "Ocean"
She was working in a nail salon, and like many Vietnamese immigrants she learned English just talking to customers. One summer day she said, "It's so hot, I wish I was at the beach," except she pronounced it in a word that resembled a derogatory term.
And so the customer suggested, "why not ocean?"
When she learned what that word was, and what it meant — which is a body of water that touches both America and Vietnam, she decided to rename me Ocean. I always say that I come from a line of poets even though my family cannot read or write. As you can see, her mind was already a mind geared and keen towards the imagination.
On preserving his Vietnamese culture in the U.S.
I was raised in a one-bedroom apartment in Hartford. It was in a way a small village of Vietnamese women who raised me, so Vietnam was preserved in this American city — the city of Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, Harriet Beecher Stowe. And here we are, a group of seven Vietnamese people speaking only Vietnamese every day — eating Vietnamese food with a little KFC sprinkled in.
On writing about war in his poetry
It feels quintessentially very American to me to be an inheritor of war. My life and my poems try to investigate that intersection of what it means to be an American body born out of violence, making sense out of violence.
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