WRITING THROUGH GRIEF

IN MARCH 2019, THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE publication of Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he called his agent from the hallway of a Hartford, Conn., hospital. “There’s no way I can go on tour,” he said. “My mother has cancer. It’s over.”

The first time his mother Hong had gone to the emergency room with terrible back pain, he wasn’t with her. The hospital sent her home with an adhesive heat patch. Vuong, who lives in Northampton, Mass., with his partner Peter, went to see her and took her back to the ER; this time, doctors ran tests and returned with a diagnosis: Stage IV breast cancer. It was in her spine, the marrow of her bones.

“When she went herself, she got a heat pad. When I came, with English, she went to the oncology ward,” Vuong, 33, tells me. In his voice I hear pain, but no shock: he and his mother experienced many similar moments after arriving in the U.S. as refugees in 1990. “I thought, Here we are again: I have to speak for you. I have to speak for your pain. I have to verbalize your humanity. Because it’s not a given. Which is the central problem with how we value Asian American women.”