He is still a practitioner of Zen Buddhism to this day. At the same time, however, Ocean sought the advice of a guidance counselor and used his school's library to access Buddhist resources, which helped him make positive changes in his life.
#Ocean vuong series#
Moreover, as an adolescent, Ocean's life was defined by a series of low-paying jobs and drug issues, and Ocean knew many people who overdosed or similarly struggled during Connecticut's burgeoning opioid crisis. At 13, Ocean and his family moved to Glastonbury, where he attended a prestigious public school but struggled in the face of racial prejudice, homophobia, suspected dyslexia, and classroom politics that Ocean later claims "literally erased" him and his identity. When Ocean was 11, he learned to read, the first person in his family to be able to do so. Upon finding that an "ocean" is a large body of water that links multiple countries, Ocean's mother appreciated the metaphorical idea that her son could be the link between America and Vietnam, and renamed him from Vinh to Ocean. When the customer pointed out that her pronunciation of "beach" sounded more like "bitch," however, the customer offered a substitute: Ocean's mother could say she was planning to go to the ocean. One day, while Ocean's mother was working at a nail salon as a manicurist, she was telling a customer about how much she wanted to go to the beach. Moreover, it was after his father vanished that Ocean's mother decided to rename him. This absence of a father figure, as well as the importance of motherly figures, eventually comes to be a major force at play in Ocean's work. Later, his parents would divorce and his father would essentially disappear, leaving Ocean to be raised by his mother, his grandmother, and his aunt. His father had earlier spent time in a Communist prison in Vietnam.
Shortly after arriving in America, however, Ocean's father was arrested for domestic violence against his mother. As a result, Ocean's family evacuated to the Philippines while waiting for their asylum request to be processed in the United States.Īfter waiting for 8 months, Ocean and six family members emigrated to America as refugees, settling in Hartford, Connecticut. Later, however, while she was working in a salon in Saigon, a police officer discovered that Ocean's mother was mixed race and thus working illegally under the country's laws. When she was 18 years old, Ocean was born. As a result, she separated her three children-Ocean's mother among them-and placed them in separate orphanages so that they would not be evacuated from Vietnam or exploited by dissidents looking to leave the country with "family." Ocean's mother remained separated from her family into her adulthood. His maternal grandfather was an American soldier in Vietnam, and his grandmother was-as relayed in the poem "Notebook Fragments"-a local "Vietnamese farmgirl." When Saigon fell in 1975, however, his grandfather was in the United States visiting family, and his grandmother feared that she and her children would be targeted as collaborators. Ocean Vuong (born Vinh Quoc Vuong) is a Vietnamese-American poet and novelist, born on a farm outside Saigon in 1988.
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