I notice people describe your work as auto-fiction even when you explain that it isn’t really based on your own life. It’s ‘show me your papers’, but by another name. Beneath the question ‘Where are you from?’ is a surveillance desire. I think a more interesting question is: ‘Where are you going?’ But they don’t ask that. When people ask me, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ the question is already presuming what is possible. In one of my favourite poems of yours ‘Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong’ (2016), you write: ‘The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed.’

You seem so much more concerned with being and becoming, than with origins. What I notice you doing is troubling whether that should be the question we should be asking in the first place. Where are you really from? When we don’t offer the answer they presume, there’s chaos. And it’s often levied against us as Asian Americans. Q The White Review - ‘Where are you from?’ sets the geo-political coordinates of who belongs and who doesn’t. As he writes, ‘How else do we return ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.’ They are poems of mourning and grief, which negotiate the aftermath of the death of Vuong’s mother. Vuong’s new collection of poems, Time is a Mother, will be released in 2022. What does it mean to write subjects who have been so overdetermined by the racist imagination? Vuong and Vaid-Menon grapple with finding ways to push beyond inclusion and appreciate the creative work of Asian Americans on their own terms. This conversation begins there, examining the ways in which Asian American literature has been recruited in the service of cultivating white empathy and humanising Asian Americans. ‘Stop Asian Hate’ flooded the global newsfeed, the shooting a brutal reflection of the anti-Asian sentiment already heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic. He killed eight people, six of whom were Asian. On 16 March 2021, a 21-year-old white male entered three massage and spa parlours in Atlanta, Georgia, and opened fire. In the following conversation, which took place in the wake of a spate of high-profile anti-Asian hate crimes, Vuong discusses Asian American literature with the performance artist and writer Alok Vaid-Menon. ‘Ocean, don’t be afraid,’ the author writes, ‘The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed.’

In his first collection of poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016), is a poem entitled ‘Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong’. Vuong’s writing gives clarity to tender feelings. Their relationship is underscored by migration, loss, inherited trauma and the difficulty of navigating working-class life in America. It is an epistolary novel, written from a son, affectionately called ‘Little Dog’, to a mother who cannot read. ‘Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you,’ begins Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019).

Femme in public alok vaid menon