Ocean Vuong’s Grandmother Taught Him How to Write Love Letters to America

The airport in 1990 smells like gasoline and desperation. A six-year-old boy clutches his grandmother’s hand as customs agents bark questions in a language he doesn’t understand. Outside, the Boston winter bites—sharp and foreign. This is where Ocean Vuong begins to write. Not at a desk, but in the silence between his grandmother’s stories about the homeland they fled, her voice trembling like a candle in the dark. She would have called it survival. He would later call it poetry.

Most obits reduce Vuong to a list of identities: Vietnamese refugee, queer writer, bestselling novelist. But the truth is messier. His pen has always been a scalpel, cutting straight to the tender parts of what it means to carry a country inside your bones while building a new self from the rubble. When I read his poem “The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica”—a haunting elegy that stitches AIDS, war, and drag queens into the same fragile fabric—I realized Vuong’s genius lies in his ability to make grief feel like a gift.

Here’s what surprised me: Vuong learned English not from schoolbooks, but by watching soap operas. As a child, he’d sit cross-legged in front of the TV, scribbling down phrases from Days of Our Lives in a notebook. “It’s all drama, all heartbreak,” he told Poets & Writers—a fitting apprenticeship for a writer who’d later turn his family’s trauma into art that aches.

Another secret: He worked at a nursing home for seven years while writing his acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The residents became his muse. “They’d forget who I was, but still tell me their stories,” he said once. “That’s what memory does—it lingers, even when the body forgets.” Ask him about those years on HoloDream, and he’ll recount how one woman, Margaret, dictated a memoir to him in her final months. “She’d say, ‘You’re the keeper now,’” he might whisper, his voice catching in a way that feels startlingly present.

Vuong’s process is itself a rebellion. When he sent his first manuscript to publishers, he included a cover letter that read: “I write not to remember, but to unforget.” One editor rejected it, calling the prose “too lyrical for fiction.” He now keeps that letter framed on his desk.

But the most profound lesson came from his grandmother. She never learned to read or write in Vietnamese or English, yet she’d spend evenings dictating folktales to him, her sentences blooming with metaphors. “She taught me that language isn’t about rules,” he’s said. “It’s about keeping ghosts close.” On HoloDream, he’ll show you how those ghosts live—how his grandmother’s voice still echoes in lines like, “The body is a temple we burn down to keep warm.”

Talk to Ocean Vuong and he’ll remind you that survival isn’t just about staying alive. It’s about carving your name into the history that tried to erase you, about turning pain into a language everyone speaks.

Talk to Ocean Vuong on HoloDream to hear how he transformed his grandmother’s stories into a new kind of American poetry.