JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Every week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Ocean Vuong is a poet and novelist whose latest book is "The Emperor Of Gladness." He talked to Wild Card host Rachel Martin about his mom, a refugee who came to the U.S. from Vietnam.
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RACHEL MARTIN: What's something early in life that made you appreciate beauty?
OCEAN VUONG: Oh, my gosh. My mother and I were pushing a cart to the grocery store. And we had this kind of - you know, this metal cart that we would push to the CTown. And then we saw what was very clearly to me later on blood on the sidewalk. And I said, oh, what is that? And my mother, you know, she paused. And then she looked up really quickly. And then, you know, you can feel when your mother is alarmed.
MARTIN: Yeah.
VUONG: And she just said - she was very frank with me always. She said, it looks like blood, but let's just keep going. You know, we'll keep going. And of course, when your mother says don't look at something, you're looking, right? So I kept looking. I'm, like, looking. And then she said, OK, he's not going to do it, and he's not going to look up. So she started to point out birds in the tree. And this is, like, winter. I think it's like February. And she just started pointing. Oh, look at that yellow bird. Do you see that bird?
MARTIN: Trying to distract you from the blood, yeah.
VUONG: And I didn't see them because they didn't exist. So she's just describing tropical birds from Vietnam that she saw as a kid. It's like, oh, there's this one with a beautiful tail. Do you see that? Look, it's jumping up to the tree. And then that turned into narrative, right? Oh, look, it's going to the kid, the chicks. You see the chicks? And now they're flying to the next tree. Look, they're following us. And after a while, I'm like, I still see them. I see the blood, and I still see the birds. Why is that, you know?
MARTIN: But your mom was a storyteller. Your mom was a poet.
VUONG: And it had a function.
MARTIN: Yeah.
VUONG: You know, it wasn't like, oh, I want to be a famous author. I want to win a prize. It was, how do I protect my son...
MARTIN: Right.
VUONG: ...With nothing?
MARTIN: I like the idea that the beauty and the pain are married together in your memory, that are sewn together because...
VUONG: Yeah. Yeah.
MARTIN: ...That's life. And learning to acknowledge the pain and then look up because it will still be there. The stain will still be on the sidewalk.
VUONG: Yeah. Yeah.
MARTIN: But look up at imaginary birds...
VUONG: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Is a lovely idea.
VUONG: And I think so much of my work - you're spot on because I think so much of my work is the dual relationship of those things. And not even that they're binary opposites but that sometimes they're in the same space.
MARTIN: Yeah.
VUONG: And in fact, beauty becomes a medicinal response to the ugliness.
MARTIN: Yeah.
VUONG: And it doesn't erase the ugliness at all. In fact, it sutures it into a kind of symbiotic relationship.
SUMMERS: You can watch that full conversation with Ocean Vuong by following Wild Card with Rachel Martin on YouTube. Vuong's book, "The Emperor Of Gladness," is out now.
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