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\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nI didn\u2019t realize Connecticut had a reputation, until I left it\u2026 and when I went to New York to go to school, when I said I came from Connecticut, everyone said, oh how fancy. And I said what do you mean, and they said well..full of mansions, and private schools, and yachts, and golf clubs. And I thought, gosh where is that happening? That\u2019s not the Connecticut that I knew. And then I realized that so much of the Connecticut formed by immigrants\u2014Jamaican, Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican\u2026 Chinese immigrants \u2014who worked this land, many of whom worked the agriculture\u2014the tobacco fields.\u2026 why is this so invisible? Why is my Hartford so different than Mark Twain\u2019s, and Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s and Wallace Stevens\u2019? And how come no one has spoken about that in an honest way? And in a way that doesn\u2019t just denigrate it; it\u2019s also a place where people live, and still live. My family still lives there. And it\u2019s a place where I also found my imagination.<\/p>\n
–Ocean Vuong, Where we Live,<\/em>\u00a0WNPR, July 8, 2025<\/p>\n Poet and memoirist Ocean Vuong\u2019s tales of immigrant achievement in 21st-century Hartford revise familiar depictions of Connecticut. This Connecticut city is not the landscape of mansions and private schools so often imagined. Vuong\u2019s Connecticut does not appear in television portrayals of The Gilmore Girls<\/em>\u2019 Stars Hollow, the Westport of American Housewife<\/em>, the Fairfield of Who\u2019s the Boss?,<\/em> or even the Judging Amy<\/em> episodes set in West Hartford and Hartford. This city does not appear in the work of 20th-century, Hartford-born writers Dominick Dunne, John Gregory Dunne, or Jay McInerney.<\/p>\n But this Connecticut does exist and a version of it occasionally emerges. Characters from Vuong\u2019s Hartford might recognize the Wallingford Beverly Donofrio escapes in her teen-mom-as-aspiring-college-student memoir Riding in Cars with Boys<\/em>. They\u2019ve certainly seen the East Hartford portrayed in William J. Mann\u2019s coming-of-age and coming-out novel Object of Desire<\/em>, but the Gilmore Girls<\/em>\u2019 Connecticut is the most dominant portrayal in the public imagination. The neighborhoods and realities navigated by Vuong\u2019s characters are found in cities across Connecticut where many young residents chart paths toward achievement despite economic, cultural, and social obstacles.<\/p>\n Readers and critics discovered Vuong\u2019s Hartford in 2010 with the publication of his poetry chapbook Burnings<\/em>. Since then, he has continued refining his imagery in a series of award-winning essays, poetry volumes, and novels. This New York Times<\/em> bestselling author and MacArthur Genius grant recipient writes with a life knowledge of the region\u2019s 21st-century, first-generation, American residents. Vuong claims the city for characters whose life circumstances reflect the realities he has known as well as the people who inspired him to succeed.<\/p>\n Born in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to parents traumatized by the Vietnam war, Vuong accepted this circumstance as inspirational lineage for writing and living. By his third birthday, his mother evacuated the family to America through a relocation camp in the Philippines. In Hartford she worked in nail salons and they lived in subsidized housing while the family grew. Their generational history\u2014war, complex citizenship, migration, economic struggle\u2014adds a particular nuance to the story of immigration immortalized in iconic American memoirs of ascent. The genre includes now classic memoirs like Richard Rodriguez\u2019s Hunger of Memory<\/em> (1982), along with such contemporary titles as Russell Shorto\u2019s Small Time<\/em> (2021), Julia Alvarez\u2019s, Something to Declare<\/em> (1998), and Matt Ortile\u2019s The Groom Will Keep his Name: and Other Vows I\u2019ve Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance<\/em> (2020).<\/p>\n Vuong\u2019s version of fictionalized autobiography, or poetic memoir, integrates his maternal relatives\u2019 oral traditions, his own 21st-century literary instincts, and the history of battles he\u2019s survived. As he explained to podcaster Krista Tippet in an interview days before the pandemic shutdown, \u201cI was surrounded by storytellers, by survivors and storytellers. And so, my grandmother and my mother and my aunt would tell stories to recalibrate their past, to make sense of their past. And my root in the narrative and literary techniques and embodiment begins way before I entered a classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n Vuong\u2019s poem “Beautiful Short Loser,” from the volume Time is A Mother<\/em>, draws American pop culture, Colt Factory employment, state authority, economic stagnation, personal identity, and family history into the writer\u2019s project of identification.<\/p>\n Now I\u2019m a beautiful short loser dancing in the rain. Inside my head the war is everywhere. Do you think I\u2019ll need a gun where we\u2019re going? Can you believe my uncle worked at the Colt Factory for ten years, only to use a belt at the end?<\/p>\n Later the writer confesses, \u201cI know. I know the room you\u2019ve been crying in is called America.\u201d\u00a0 In The New Yorker<\/em> essay, “A Letter to My Mother that She will Never Read” \u2014 the template for Vuong\u2019s autofiction book On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous<\/em>\u2014 he questions, \u201cWhen does a war end? When can I say your name, and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?\u201d These battles are familial and national; the characters\u2019 fight to maintain family and they fight for a life outside of it.<\/p>\n Vuong gained his independence by processing the transition from Vietnam to America. As he grew into the family spokesperson\u2014English proficient, intellectually capable, and American culture savvy\u2014he endured his mother\u2019s fits of frustration at her status. That frustration appeared sporadically in waves of raging aggression. Vuong alludes to this dynamic in the letter as the narrator remembers,<\/p>\n The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made. But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered. After a while, after the stutters, the false starts, the words warped or locked in your throat, after failure, you slammed the book shut. I don\u2019t need to read<\/em>, you said, pushing away from the table. I can see\u2014it\u2019s gotten me this far, hasn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n References to the injuries of class and his own experience of class transition due to education and success as a writer are always present for Vuong. \u201cI tried to explain this to my mother, the loneliness of class movement,\u201d he explains in a New York Times Magazine<\/em> interview with David Marchese (May 3, 2025).<\/p>\n It\u2019s a lot of grief. You enter these rooms [that is, professional settings], and even with my colleagues, they\u2019re all lovely, but it\u2019s hard to explain what we were talking about earlier [in the interview about the trauma of immigrant displacement and poverty]. I never say that stuff, because I feel like it\u2019s going to stop the room. I feel really alone in these spaces, and then when I come home, no one cares.<\/p>\n Vuong\u2019s family grew to include a younger brother, and the arrival of his mother\u2019s female relatives meant an extended family even as neighborhood friendships pulled him further into American life. He attended Sunday worship services. He got a summer job working on a tobacco farm. He learned the rules of survival in the fast-food sector of the service industry. He became the Personal Care Assistant for his partner\u2019s grandmother during a break from school\u2014an experience that inspired his 2025 novel The Emperor of Gladness<\/em>. Wisdom from those years shapes Vuong\u2019s writing and influences his life. In the New York Times Magazine<\/em> profile he reflects,<\/p>\n We want stories of change, yet American life is often static. You drive the same car, people live in the same apartment, but it doesn\u2019t mean that their lives are worthless. This book\u2014it\u2019s not a spoiler to say that nobody gets a better job, no one gets a raise. So what happens? I\u2019ve been interested in this idea of kindness without hope. What I saw working in fast food growing up in Hartford County was that people are kind even when they know it won\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n The combination of kindness and hope helped Vuong navigate the public networks of support. Hartford, the Insurance Capital of the World, once had sufficient corporate wealth, civic benevolence, and accessible land to offer kindness and hope to needy, new residents and established citizens. So much of the wealth that financed those novice jobs, subsidized neighborhood assistance, and generated community investment had been consumed before the last decades of the 20th century.<\/p>\n That dissolution forced a new network of public resources to respond. Wraparound services at public schools, local public libraries, subsidized housing, community supported youth activities, and the state community college system all had an enhanced role alongside traditional service providers. This assortment represents Ocean Vuong\u2019s Hartford where everyday examples of kindness\u2014and hope\u2014continue to make so much possible. That combination facilitated Vuong\u2019s transfer into Glastonbury schools before his family had secured a local affordable housing unit there.<\/p>\n On a drive with journalist and Glastonbury High alum Kat Chow, Vuong revisits the sentimental landscape of his high school years, noting the academic struggles, the casual bigotry and homophobia, the ubiquitous opioids, the discovery of writing as a refuge, and his need to escape. He admits, \u201cWe literally erased ourselves to go to school here\u2026 And there was shame with that, too, because I didn\u2019t know how to make use of it. Everyone says, \u2018It\u2019s a great school,\u2019 and I was like, \u2018I dunno!…I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s that great. I feel like I\u2019m judged before I step into any room\u2026\u2019\u00a0 (The Atlantic).<\/p>\n In talking with David Marchese for the New York Times<\/em> he remembers,\u201d My guidance counselor persuaded me to go to community college. My first class there, the syllabus was Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Foucault. And I realized writing was not writing a respectable email to get a job. It was a medium of understanding suffering. That\u2019s when it changed [for me].\u201d From Manchester Community College he transferred to Pace University and then Brooklyn College where he committed to writing.\u00a0 He received his MFA in Poetry from NYU where he now teaches.<\/p>\n The 2025 release of Vuong\u2019s novel The Emperor of Gladness<\/em> and the campaign supporting it secured his identification as the public intellectual burnished by 21st-century Hartford and representing it with kindness, truth, and hope.\u00a0 With an acknowledgment of Twain, Stowe, Stevens, the Dunnes, and so many other writers that preceded him (the book\u2019s title is an homage to Stevens\u2019 \u201cThe Emperor of Ice Cream\u201d), Vuong celebrates this moment in Hartford\u2019s complex history where new residents continue to arrive, identify the obstacles that might impede, and create the necessary pathways.<\/p>\n Ocean Vuong emerges from the intersection of multiple identities evident in contemporary Hartford. His success at integrating them and producing prize-winning literary material from the experience is an affirmation of constant evolution within Connecticut cities and the dedication of new residents to create there.<\/p>\n Ocean Vuong: Hartfordian<\/a> (audio transcript, CT Museum, 2014)<\/p>\n Not Even This<\/a> (Poetry<\/em>, from Time is a Mother<\/em>, 2022)<\/p>\n Toy Boat<\/a> (Poetry<\/em>, April 2016.)<\/p>\n A Little Closer to the Edge<\/a> (Poetry<\/em>, April 2016)<\/p>\n Essay on Craft<\/a> (Poetry<\/em>, July\/August 2017)<\/p>\n DetoNation<\/a> (Poetry<\/em>, February 2014)<\/p>\n Torso of Air<\/a> (Poetry<\/em>, from Night Sky with Exit Wounds<\/em>, 2016)<\/p>\n Reimagining Masculinity<\/a> (The Paris Review<\/em>,\u00a0 June 10, 2019)<\/p>\n Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong<\/a> (Spencer Quong, The Paris Review<\/em>, June 5, 2019)<\/p>\n The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation<\/a> (The Rumpus<\/em>, August 28, 2014) Note: includes discussion of suicide.<\/p>\n Beginnings: New York<\/a> (The Adroit Journal, <\/em>Summer 2015)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hartford \u2013 \u201cWhere I Found my Imagination\u201d by Frank Mitchell I didn\u2019t realize Connecticut had a reputation, until I left it\u2026 and when I went to New York to go to school, when I said I came from Connecticut, everyone said, oh how fancy. And I said what do you mean, and they said well..full … Continue reading Ocean Vuong (1988- )<\/span> Vuong\u2019s 21st Century Hartford<\/h5>\n
\u00a0The Making of a Poetic Memoirist<\/h5>\n
Complexities of Upward Mobility<\/h5>\n
Kindness, Truth, and Hope<\/h5>\n
Anthology Selections<\/h5>\n
Poetry<\/h6>\n
Essays<\/h6>\n
Ocean Vuong \u2013 Biographical and Critical Sources<\/a><\/h6>\n