His grandparents married and had three daughters, one of whom was Vuong's mother.[7] His grandfather had gone back to visit home in the US but was unable to return whenSaigon fell to communist forces. Fearing for their safety, his grandmother made the difficult decision to place his mother and her sisters in separateorphanages. With the rising dangers associated with being seen as a collaborator, she believed splitting them up would give them the best chance for survival. "It was ahumanitarian crisis, and there was more chance of them surviving like that," he explains. His grandmother also worried they might be taken out ofVietnam.[7]
As daughters of aUS serviceman, they would have qualified forOperation Babylift—a program that evacuated children to the United States for adoption. If kept together, they might have also been viewed as a family unit, making them a target for dissidents seeking to leave the country. By separating them, she hoped to protect them from these risks and increase their chances of survival.[7]
By the time the family was reunited, his mother had already reached adulthood. At 18, she had given birth to Ocean and was working in aSaigon salon, washing men's hair to make ends meet.[7] However, hermixed-race heritage caught the attention of a policeman, who recognized that, under Vietnamese law, she was working illegally due to her background. This discovery put the family at significant risk, forcing them to fleeVietnam for safety. The family wasevacuated to arefugee camp in thePhilippines, where they waited as theSalvation Army processed theirresettlement claim. Two-year-old Vuong and his family eventually gained asylum and migrated to the United States.[7] They settled inHartford, Connecticut, along with seven relatives sharing a one-bedroom apartment.[8] His father abandoned the family one day and never returned.
Vuong was the first in his family to achieve proficiency in reading and writing, learning to read at the age of eleven.[8] He suspecteddyslexia ran in his family.[7] At 15 years old, Vuong worked on atobacco farm illegally and would later describe his experiences on the farm inOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.[9] He was reunited with hispaternal grandfather later in life.[10][11][7]
His firstchapbook,Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press), was a 2011 "Over The Rainbow" selection for notable books with LGBT content by theAmerican Library Association.[23] His second chapbook,No (YesYes Books), was released in 2013.[24] His debut full-length collection,Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was released byCopper Canyon Press in 2016.[25] His first novel,On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published byPenguin Press on June 4, 2019. While working on the novel, the biggest issue Vuong had was with grammatical tense, since there are no past participles inVietnamese. Vuong also regarded the book as a "phantom novel" dedicated to the "phantom readership of the mother, of [his] family," who are illiterate and thus cannot read his book.[26] Vuong's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer three months before the publication ofOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.[27] After his mother died in 2019, Vuong began writing his second collection of poetry,Time Is a Mother, which has been described as a "search for life after the death of his mother."[28]
In August 2020, Vuong was revealed as the seventh writer to contribute to theFuture Library project. The project, which compiles original works by writers each year from 2014 to 2114, will remain unread until the collected 100 works are eventually published in 2114. Discussing his contribution to the project, Vuong opined that, "So much of publishing is about seeing your name in the world, but this is the opposite, putting the future ghost of you forward. You and I will have to die in order for us to get these texts. That is a heady thing to write towards, so I will sit with it a while."[29]
Vuong has stated his view of fiction as a moral vehicle. DiscussingOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, he said: "Fiction is strongest when it launches a moral question. When it goes out and seeks to answer. The questions that we couldn't ask in life because the costs would be too much. Fiction and narrative art give us a vicarious opportunity to see these questions play out, at no true cost to our own."[30]
He served as the 2019–2020 Artist-In-Resident at NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute, also working with the school's Center for Refugee Poetics and the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.[31][32] In 2022, he became a tenured Professor of Creative Writing at NYU,[33] and has also taught in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at theUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst.[34][8] In 2022, Vuong was named as one of "32 Essential Asian American Writers" byBuzzFeed Books.[31]
Vuong has described himself as being raised by women. During a conversation with a customer, his mother, amanicurist, expressed a desire to go to the beach, and pronounced the word "beach" as "bitch". The customer suggested she use the word "ocean" instead of "beach". After learning the definition of the word "ocean" — the most massive classified body of water, such as the Pacific Ocean, which connects the United States and Vietnam – she renamed her son Ocean.[10]
Three months before the novelOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was published, Vuong's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died in November 2019.[37] Vuong wroteTime Is a Mother while in mourning. According to Vuong, the collection of poems is the search for life after this heartbreaking event.[38][39]
In November 2021, an excerpt fromOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was featured in that year'sNew South Wales Higher School Certificate exams. The paper, the first of two English exams taken by year twelve students in the Australian state, required examinees to read an excerpt from the novel and answer a short question responding to it. On the exam's conclusion, Australian school students bombarded Vuong with confused inquiries via Instagram, to which the author responded in humorous fashion.[40]
Vuong is gay[41][42][43] and is a practicingZen Buddhist.[44] He lives inNorthampton, Massachusetts, with his partner, Peter Bienkowski, and his half-brother whom he took in after their mother died.[8][45][46] During theIsrael–Hamas war, he is a supporter of the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals.[47][48]
As of 2024, Vuong has won, received a nomination, or was considered for literature awards as well as career awards for fellowship and grant, residences, and listicles.
^Ocean Vuong (October 31, 2016)."Scavengers".The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 36. p. 51.Archived from the original on December 28, 2023. RetrievedDecember 28, 2023.
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