Ocean Vuong — Hope Portal, Episode 4

We follow Naomi Shihap Nye with another writer, Ocean Vuong. He is like her, a teacher with words and about words. And they both illustrate an idea that I love of the ancient rabbis that I experienced to be true, that words make worlds. Or to make that more active, we create worlds with our words. We also have a power to destroy with our words. We can make someone's day or break someone's day with our words. They are muscles of such force. And if hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being. Ocean Vuong is such a fascinating and singular person. He has become extraordinarily important in American letters as a poet, as a novelist, as an essayist. And he did not learn to read until after he was 11. There is a great deal of dyslexia in his family, and his family had immigrated to The US from Vietnam and survived war and refugee camps to get here. And I notice that often when people describe Ocean's writing, they describe it as an opus that chronicles the survival of violence. And that is true. But I'd also say that the sweep of his work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what was carried and what has been survived. And that I would say is the quality and content of the hope that I think Ocean carries and bodies. It's interesting. I asked him about the spirituality of his childhood, and he talked about how spirituality in his home began with care rooted in physical bodies. And he mentioned that in temples, and even in many Asian American households, certainly in his, when you enter the house, you take off your shoes. This too is a spiritual act. It's an act of respect. I'm going to take off my shoes to enter something, some place important. He's echoing Naomi here. He said, I'm going to give you my best self. And Ocean said, I think even consciously when I read or give lectures or when I teach, I lower my voice. I want to make my words deliberate. I want to take off the shoes of my voice so that I can enter a place with care, so that I can do the work that I need to do. What a thing to learn from. So here's a little bit of my conversation with him. I think you'll hear as you experience his voice, that he has taken the shoes off his voice. And there's a lot to learn in these next few moments. The language of energy, and you use a lot of energy metaphors and imagery for how you work with words and how words work in us. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's as as a species, as …