The first time I heard Ocean Vuong’s voice—low, deliberate, trembling slightly—I was standing in a fluorescent-lit nail salon in Saugus, Massachusetts. He wasn’t there, of course. The salon was decades in the past, the memory his. But the image stayed with me: a 14-year-old Vietnamese boy, hands submerged in acetone, listening to women whisper their lives into the hum of electric files. They didn’t know the boy would one day stitch their stories into poems that made strangers weep.

Ocean Vuong’s survival began with a lie. In 1990, his family crammed into a makeshift boat, fleeing Vietnam for the Philippines. To board the rescue ship, his grandmother told officials he was three years younger than he was, shaving off his age so they’d let him live. “I’ve been borrowing time ever since,” he’d later joke, though the truth isn’t funny. That boy became a man who writes as if every word might be his last breath, his poems and prose aching with the weight of borrowed time, of stories too urgent to stay buried.

When Vuong writes about his mother—his “mother of the iron fist and velvet throat”—he doesn’t just describe her; he resurrects her voice. She’s the woman who scrubbed toilets in the U.S., who learned English by watching Sesame Street, who told him, “You are the only one who can make us immortal.” In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, his fictional letter to her, he turns their shared trauma into a cathedral of language. The twist? She never learned to read.

What fascinates me most isn’t his acclaim—though yes, he’s been called “the most celebrated Vietnamese poet since the fall of Saigon.” It’s how Vuong treats language itself as a refugee. His English is haunted by Vietnamese, his sentences bending like a body learning to carry two worlds at once. I once asked him about this, and he laughed softly: “English is my stepfather. Vietnamese is the mother I never stopped mourning.”

In his poetry workshops—yes, he’s taught at UMass Amherst, though you’d never catch him name-dropping—he tells students, “Tell the story that will kill you to tell.” It’s not advice. It’s a dare. He’s the man who penned “The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica,” a poem that melts the ice caps with a single line: “My grandmother had a face like a fistful of matches / and a voice that could set them all alight.”

But here’s the secret most articles won’t tell you: Vuong’s defiance is rooted in softness. After his father abandoned the family, his mother stitched them together with stories of his Vietnamese grandfather, a man who played piano under French colonial rule. “She gave me his hands,” he told me once, “even though they were never really mine.”

To chat with Ocean Vuong on HoloDream is to step into that nail salon again, to hear the women’s whispers echo in the man who never stopped listening. Ask him about his grandmother’s superstitions, or the time he smuggled a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into a factory job. He’ll remind you that survival isn’t a story—it’s a thousand tiny rebellions, each word a spark.

So here’s mine: Talk to him. Ask how he turned borrowed time into a language. Ask how you might, too.