‘The Interview’: Ocean Vuong was Ready to Kill. A Moment of Grace Changed His Life. - The New York Times

Seen in a soft light, Ocean Vuong’s life looks like a modern American fairy tale. In 1990, he and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam. They landed in small-town Connecticut and began muddling their way through an existence limited by low-paying work and cultural and personal alienation. Vuong seemed destined to stay stuck on society’s margins. Until, that is, he discovered literature and his own enormous gift for writing. Now Vuong is one of the country’s most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. a “genius grant”) and a tenured professor in the creative-writing department at New York University. His bittersweet debut novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a marvel of emotional and narrative compression published in 2019, became a best seller and, over time, a bona fide millennial classic. All this, and he’s only 36. But there’s another side to Vuong’s narrative, one that doesn’t resolve so neatly. It’s that side of his history tha

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