Photo Illustration: 731; Photos: Gincarlo Valentine (Vuong), Getty Image (background)
Someday We’ll All Love Ocean Vuong
Fresh off a tour for his second novel — an Oprah’s Book Club pick — the author is learning to live with being seen as a translator of the immigrant experience.
Ocean Vuong examines his fame like something curious in a shop window. “I’ve been just kind of looking at it with an out-of-body experience, almost like an anthropological study,” he says. “It’s something that America does with anything of value or note — it turns it into a celebrity.”
Vuong has just returned from a whistle-stop book tour for his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, when we meet at his home in mid-June. In May, the book was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, a Midas touch that instantly transmuted Vuong from a rare celebrity poet with an unusually avid fanbase to a full-fledged literary star.