Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - How America Revealed Itself To Ocean Vuong

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Novelist and poet, Ocean Vuong, traces his family’s path from Vietnam to a refugee camp in the Philippines to a new life in Connecticut. He reflects on the beauty and the brutality of American fast food, and how long days on a tobacco farm shaped both his writing and his sense of self. Plus, he shares his family’s recipe for canh chua—a delicious Vietnamese soup that’s less time-intensive than pho! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Your Mama's Kitchen is brought to you by Rivian. My family love the mall because you walk in there, you have no history. Nobody knows that you're poor. Nobody knows what neighborhood you come from. Nobody knows that you came here on a bus. Nobody knows that you have food stamps. You can dress to the nines and you enter this egalitarian utopia of the mall, the truest town square in America.

Nobody knows where anybody is from, but everyone gets to go to Godiva chocolate. Hello, hello, welcome back to your mama's kitchen. This is the place where we explore how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens that we grew up in as kids. Of course, the food, but so many other things also. The music on the radio, the way you would eavesdrop on your parents, the way that food in the kitchen would provide a taste of home from a distant land. I'm Michelle Norris. And Ocean Vong is our guest today. Ocean is an essayist. He's a novelist. He's a professor. He is a poet. He is the author of a poetry collection called Night Sky with Exit Wounds. It was published in 2016. And he made quite a splash with that volume. He won a T.S. Eliot Prize and a Whiting Award. His loosely autobiographical debut novel, On Earth, were briefly gorgeous, was also a worldwide. sensation. And he just recently published his second novel. It's called The Emperor of Gladness.

And that was an instant New York Times bestseller. It was also an Oprah's book club pick. His mega fans run the gamut from Dua to Andrew Garfield to Bjork. And he's been called a genius by the MacArthur Fellowship. We could not be more excited to have him join us today. Ocean, it's good to have you with us. Thanks so much for making time. Oh, thank you so much. And by the way, I have no. evidence of any of those accolades. So it's just... You know, just accept them. Just say, thank you. Let it all wash over you. Mythologies, right? Yes, yes, yes. It's a pleasure to be here. I have a feeling you're going to live up to the height. And I look forward to this conversation.

Your family immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990. As I understand, you were very young. two years old. Your family settled in Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut, a community that I don't know how more different it could be than Ho Chi Men City. And so I'm wondering

if you think about the kitchen that you grew up in, if you could tell us a little bit about it, big family, tell me about the kitchen table. Tell me about your memories. What do you think about? What sort of animates your senses

when you go back in your mind and you think about your childhood kitchen. Oh, wow. Well, we lived in this tenement on New Britain Avenue in Hartford, and it was one of those one hallway floors, and everybody's main door was always open. So immediately, our private kitchen was kind of very fluid with other people's kitchens, right? So the kids would just play down the hall, and our neighbors, you know, most of whom were,

immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, their cooking and their music was going on. So it would be reggaeton, R&B, Motown, my grandmother's singing. So it was such a vibrant, open space, chaotic, you know, loud. Everybody knew everybody's business. If somebody's having an argument, you know exactly what it was about, often about money. and so to me it was hard to know where your family ended and where someone else's began, because you would just step across the hallway and we're talking maybe six steps. And all of a sudden, somebody would come in and say, can I get some pepper? You know, can I get some coconut milk? So it was very communal. And it actually, ironically, it is very different, but it looked as it was told to me and functioned very similar to the refugee camp in the Philippines where we just came from.

We spent nine months there after leaving Vietnam. And it was a tiny kitchen, seven people. And the kitchen spilled into the living room, right? Because my aunts would, you know, prepare the meals. We would prepare, you know, cut the, everyone worked on the floor over newspaper. And you would cut the chicken in the living room, squatting. you would pluck the green beans, you know, wash herbs, you know, and then move into the stove. And so the whole house became a kind of extended kitchen.

And that just felt very normal to us. I didn't realize what a quote-unquote quintessential American house was until much, much later when I started to see it on TV. When your family first moved to Connecticut, how did they find a taste of home? How did they, were you able, were you suddenly sort of forced to try to explore American food and American cuisine? Or was your family really trying hard to hold on to the land in the ways that they could through the food that they put on the table? Well, because we came out of a refugee camp, we were in survival mode. So, you know, there was, it was kind of like, you know, hunkered down. do what you can get by and figure out what this place was.

It was a lot of disorientation. Before we got to the apartment in the tenement, we were in motels for a while. The Salvation Army had to figure out where to place us. We were in churches. I mean, I remember we were sleeping, we were using Bibles. It wasn't enough pillows. We would put Bibles underneath. These were thin pillows.

They gave us little blankets. And so it took a while to get there. But we were thrown right into the community. The Salvation Army gave us coupons to KFC. I remember one of my earliest memories of America was eating KFC. And my family called it Old Man Chicken because, you know, Colonel Sanders' face was on the bucket. And I remember us being utterly delighted. We have never had anything like this.

And, you know, everything is relative, you know, but if you're coming from a tin shack refugee camp, And you step into KFC with the lights, the smells, and it felt so clean. I remember my mother would say, my goodness, look how clean these tables are. We made it. We are in America. We're eating. It looked like magic food, you know, and it was free. You used pay with these coupons.

And after that, we were thrown right into the immigrant communities there. So, you know, Jamaican food, Haitian food, the spices. were all part of the smells that we would, you know, plantains, you know, so there was kind of like this, because we have plantains in Vietnam too, but we usually stewed it in coconut. So now we had fried plantains that our neighbors would have, you know, and we went to the Baptist churches. We had, you know, meals after that. There was a soup kitchen. So we really just surrendered and went all in to this new American life. And, you know, this is 1990. We did not I have a TV. We didn't have a radio. We lived in a predominantly black and brown community in a

north end of Hartford. So we didn't even really understand that America was majority white for a long time. You know, we came in the winter, and it took us about a few years to realize what this country really looked like. And, but I was just, we were just so relieved, you know, I remember the first thing my grandmother did was show, would point out the windows to me in our, in our tenement.

She said, look at this. There's a lock. Look how well it seals. I mean, again, the refugee camp had a tin roof and every wall was open. It was four families. You know,

it's not hyperbole to say that it's very close to a human pig pen where we live. It was a tropical climate. So, you know, we didn't need that shelter. But it was still, the dignity.

was very different. And again, we were in HUD housing. We were in a very poor area of the country, very poor area of the city. But we felt incredibly rich from what we survived. And I still remember that to this day. Tell me the lessons that you learned early on as America began to reveal itself to you.

The first thing, my mother, well, when we learned the bus route, we would take the bus to, Farmington. And Farmington, the only other place, only other tidbit I know about Farmington by the time I got to high school was 50 cent bought a house in Farmington, a mansion in Farmington. Oh, wait, the rapper, 50 Cent? Yeah, yeah. He bought a house in Farmington. That was the big news that I was in high school. That was kind of a fancy neighborhood. Oh, it was mansions. But it was where the mall was. So once we figured out the bus, we got to the mall. That's when America really revealed itself. The mall is interesting. It's both quintessentially American and quintessentially American because it's all mirages. It's a fantasy. And my family love the mall because you walk in there

and you have no history. Nobody knows that you're poor. Nobody knows what neighborhood you come from. Nobody knows that you came here on a bus. Nobody knows that you have food stamps. You can dress to the and you enter this egalitarian utopia of the mall, the truest town square in America. Nobody knows where anybody is from, but everyone gets to go to Godiva chocolate, Victoria's Secret. And as long as you have a little bit money to spend,

you are on equal terms with everybody. And I think that's why my mother adored the mall. I think the mall was the most American place for her because it was her chance to reinvent herself. There was no memory in a mall. And we would take the bus to the mall and bat. But that's when we start to realize, oh, wait a minute, America is very different. There are class systems here.

You know, we start to see that there's segregation. And it revealed to us in very brutal, but also very hallucinatory ways. Can we talk a little bit about your mother? She took on the name Rose. Can you tell us a little bit about her and her family history? Well, my mother's name is Rose or Haum. My grandmother was named Seven, which is a rural, you know, tradition in the country. You didn't really give your kids names.

Seven is just the order of her birth. The father's number one. She was the seventh child or the seventh person in the family. Yeah, the sixth, yeah, the sixth child. father's number one, the first child would be two, right? It's so interesting that the mother's just not, doesn't count. I was going to slide right by that. I guess mom doesn't. Yep, patriarchy is everywhere. It just has a different flavor, right? Yeah, yeah. And so my grandmother was seven. And when she, she was in an arranged marriage and to a man, 20 years, you know, her elder. And she had no choice in the matter. And so, you know, being a kind of stubborn, hard-headed woman, she broke out and she fled. You know, she put some nettles into his tea one night, give him a deep sleep, and she ran away. This is taboo. This is pretty much familial suicide in this time. It's 19, you know, 60s, Vietnam, rural.

You didn't do this. This is so shameful. But my grandmother fled. And she, she, she, you know, She went home and her mother said, you can't come back. You run away from your husband. You betrayed us. You got to go. You got to go. The only other place is the city. So she went to the city and she renamed herself Lang, which L-A-N, which is Orchid.

And so I just think to me, it's like it's so powerful and dramatic. If you put it in a novel, I think people would think, gosh, it's so, you know, neat and contrived, but life is like that. My grandmother started her life as a number after her father, and she fled from that life and named herself after the most extravagant flower in the market, right? Orchid is just this vibrant, almost monstrous flower, right? And then she named all of her daughters after flowers. My honest lotus, my mom is rose. You know, another one is tulip, marigold. So she made a garden.

After being a number, she turned her family into a garden. Oh, I love that. You know, my grandmother was a sex worker. You know, after she fled her family, there was nothing left. And a woman in a patriarchal society in the city with no money, no generational wealth, you know, she turned her body into a source of income. And, you know, my family had a lot of shame around that. I'm really proud of that.

I'm proud of her. I think to me it's such a courageous thing to do to say I'm going to use the only thing I have to sustain myself and find a way for my children. And so she worked as a sex worker. And she, during that, she met a GI. And they actually fell in love and got married. And he was, the plan was, you know, for them to live in Vietnam.

Nobody knew the war was going to be over in such catastrophic ways. They were young. And when he went home, my grandfather went home to visit his mother, the war. You know, the Saigon fell. They lost contact for years. And so all of a sudden, she's stuck in Vietnam with two daughters, emir Asian daughter, very clear, you know, Auburn hair. And now you're marked.

You are the traitor. You slept with the enemy. And these children are the byproduct. It's kind of deeply shameful. And there were white emiration children, black emiration children, and they were the biggest taboo visually. And so separating them into the Catholic orphanages was a way to spare everybody involved. But my grandma did that, hoping to get them.

back. And eventually, when they were seven and eight and seven and eight, she launched this kind of epic journey to go find them by word of mouth. I mean, it's, I mean, I, you know, it's like, life is already a novel. I mean, they lived that. So I'm here I am in Hartford, hearing all of this as a kid. That was my question. How do you know all this? Did they pass this all down to you. They were so willing with their stories. They also had a lot of secrets. But I think

they realized something really interesting was that there was four women, my grandmother and my mom and my two aunts, in the same apartment. And they gave birth. All these women gave birth to all boys.

So our family is kind of this, almost like this Russian novel, right? It's this high drama of gendered vexation. And they realized right away that they were women in another patriarchal country, but their sons were acquiring the lingua franca, English, at a rate that they would never be able to keep up. So there was a power imbalance. They understood that right away. Well, the boys had power because they had language in America and they could interact with the outside world in ways that the woman could not. Yes, they had English. And so what they did,

I noticed, was that, but it was still a matriarch in the house. The house is still a matriarchal household. And so they use storytelling to reposition themselves, to re-mythologize themselves, to make themselves, give themselves a kind of grandeur, as Tony Morrison often says, right? Language as a mode of grandeur. And so they told these stories And they were always the heroes. And I noticed too that every time they told the stories a little bit detail, some of these that would change. I'm like, okay, all right, we're in the fiction world here, right?

But they did it to reposition and reclaim the power for themselves amongst the audience of boys that they gave birth to. So it was this, and it worked. I mean, we sat there thinking, wow, our mothers are the heroes. Like, they are the most powerful thing we've ever seen. And it was like legends in our home. And I think that's why to me auto-fiction and autobiographical writing, particularly in the American context, going back to the work of many writers of color,

James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, the enslaved narratives of Harry. at Jacobs. All of that work is so important because it's not just like self-absorption. It's testimony of survival. And that's why I realize there's a different definition between the white dominant literary world of auto fiction and the work of writers of color. Autofiction for Writers of Color means a very, very different thing. It's testimony through historical pressure. And I realized, oh, they were doing auto fiction long before I ever read it in a book. And they were giving you armor. They were giving you ammunition.

They were planting seeds in you so that when you did go out into the outside world, as someone who spoke English, as someone who was a man, as someone who was a student and would naturally interact with all kinds of people, they were making sure that you knew where you came from. But it sounds like they were also trying to help you survive in that world. Yeah. I mean, my mother would say, watch how people look at you and you will know where you stand with them. And she said this, you know, it sounds like very gravit, but she would say this before we enter, you know, a little store, a little shop, you know.

And she would say, look at how they're looking at us, you know. And I didn't understand how to read that, but I knew that vigilance. was a kind of power. And this is where, to me, I have never been, I've never shied away from this idea of the imposter syndrome. I like, you know, I don't want my imposter syndrome to go away. In fact, I don't think it's a syndrome or a pathology.

I think it's a strength. I think it's imposter immune system. Because the moment that I am comfortable, next to power. The moment I am comfortable in the center, then that's the death of my imagination. I don't ever want to be comfortable there. I want to always be vigilant. I want to always be aware that I am trespassing in a place that was never made for me. I prefer that. That has given me as an artist vigilance. I know how to look at the world. I know how to be in the world and be critical of it. And the deadliest thing for an artist is to be comfortable alongside power.

And so the greatest gift, I don't know, they probably didn't understand that they were giving it to me. But the greatest gift as an artist was coming from them, showing me the power of vigilance. And to this day, I tell my students, you don't want to ever be comfortable. Always be the imposter. Because the imposter has the power of taking off the mask, putting on the mask. you have variation and those who are comfortable with power will never have the variation. And when they lose that power, they will have no other alternative to look to because they never had to develop it.

And Tony Morrison talks about that also. Who are you when you're stripped of that thing that is so important to you? There's something special about cooking in a new space. I stayed at an Airbnb once that had a griddle. I never used the griddle in my home kitchen, but I was inspired to use the griddle. And I felt like I was in a diner. I had my bacon going and my sausage and my eggs. It was great. Here's the thing. Every kitchen tells a story. And when you travel with Airbnb, you get to experience so many new kitchens and so many new stories. Imagine a vacation where you can start the day with a cup of

coffee in a sunlit kitchen, maybe sitting on a balcony overlooking the city or the ocean or the mountains. or maybe you're sitting on a porch overlooking a bubbling stream. Maybe you're at a farmhouse table where you're sharing a meal with your family or your loved ones. Airbnb's kitchen-friendly stays are perfect for food lovers who want to cook, who want to eat, who want to explore all over the world. And while you're in heaven cooking someplace else, someone could be enjoying your own kitchen back home. Hosting isn't just about having extra income. It's about creating a space that someone else can enjoy. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much by going to Airbnb.com slash host. Happy travels. We all know that food waste is bad for the planet, but that doesn't mean we're ready to start a compost pile or we're okay with having a smelly fruit fly condo compost pail on the counter. That's why I am so into the mill. food recycler. The whole idea is to make keeping food out of the trash as easy as dropping it into the trash. I just add my scraps, and I mean like almost anything. I mean anything from chicken wing bones to avocado pits to

cannolop rinds and mill runs automatically while I sleep. I can keep filling it for weeks and it never smells. What really surprises me is the peace of mind. I used to feel guilty every time I tossed out wilted spinach or half-eaten leftovers. Now I just drop them into the bin, open the lid, drop them in, and I know that they're going to a better place. You can use the grounds in your garden or feed them to your chickens, but me, I have mill, get them to small farms for me so farmers can grow more food. You just send those grounds off to farms in little boxes that mill can provide, and they will turn that back into real food for real animals. That's such a good feeling. It's a full circle moment that I didn't know that I needed. You can have your own full

circle moment. Try Mill, risk-free, and get $75 off at mill.com slash YMK podcast. That's mill.com slash YMK podcast. You write a lot about service and the tether between love and service. And you noted that for the Vietnamese, a lot of times love is articulated through service, through during an act of something for someone, making them food, giving them a massage, combing their hair, trimming their nails. Will you talk a little bit about how that played out in your family, particularly around food? Because I love the picture that you painted in your tenement apartment where the kitchen is really the entire apartment.

And every flat surface is used in some way in the preparation of some part of the meal. How was food an expression of love in your family life? Oh, gosh. I mean, body language was sometimes more legible and clear than actual linguistic language. And I would go further to say that food is also an articulation of care, is also a, a kind of language to food, how it's prepared. You can even say, like, the preparation of food is very similar to a sentence. You have subordinate clauses in the prep work, and then you have independent clauses when it's finished, when it's clear, when we're eating.

And so I think for Vietnamese folks, you know, I think often inspired and influenced by Buddhism and Taoism where action, karma, the definition of karma is action. Often it's misunderstood in the West as karma is a B word, right, as retribution or equalization, but it's not. It's simply action. It's like the cause of all action, both good and bad, is karma. And so action is a major part of life for so much, a lot of Southeast Asian cultures, but Vietnam, at least in my experience, particularly. And so we rarely rarely say, I love you. And when we did it actually, we said it in English. I would talk to my mom on the phone and said, okay, I love you. But we rarely would say that word. And yet it's felt in the caring of the body. And there are times where I start to understand the ethos of that exchange.

I realized that when I asked my mother, let me massage your shoulders. Come over here. And there's a kind of ritual, a performance. She would say no, and yet scoot over a little bit. And then I would say, and I would have to insist, come on, come on, come on. She's like, no, no, no, you're the son. You can't do this. I should be doing for you.

And there's this kind of performance. But meanwhile, we all know that at the end of the day, within a few seconds, I'm going to be massaging her for the next half hour. But there's this kind of ritual of give and take. And that becomes a kind of dialogue that I'm still, you know, thinking. figuring out as an adult. But I realized that when I'm doing that, what I'm saying is that this is how I'm going to love you because I recognize your pain. And she receives that as recognition as well and vice versa. Your mother worked in a nail salon, which meant she was hunched over a lot, shoulders up, doing detailed work on other people's hands, maybe on their

feet. And so that massage must have felt really good. Yeah. You often would accompany her to work and work alongside her. Was that in part because, you know, everybody was expected to work in the family? Was that because it was a chance for you to spend time with her? Were you in some way an ambassador or an emissary for her helping to figure out a world that you could understand better again because of your language? A little bit of all of that? All of that. You're absolutely right. And the main function was that I had English. I could run the phones.

I was 10 years old, taking appointments, filling up the agenda book, the log book. And, you know, I was also able to translate questions. And away, I was the bridge to her customers. And also, it just became natural. You came home and where's your family? They're all working. They're in the nail cell. My grandmother would come sometimes too, just sit in the back room.

She had schizophrenia, so, you know, it was more like a babysitting, you know. And the nail salon, you would have infants in the back room. You would have elders. You would have, you know, somebody's sick. You know, you can't take a day off and work, so you would bring your sick mother to the back. And it became like a nursing station, another kitchen, a place where you would do taxes. and homework. It was everything. I mean, that first rendition of the explosion of the kitchen in the tenement became recasted everywhere we worked. And so the nail salon became just another

representation of the village. And it was also chaotic, but I think there was no choice. It wasn't like you can pick up the phone and call, you know, a daycare. You couldn't afford it. So, you had to bring everything with you. And the children now had clear English without accents. And so they can, they can, you know, work that system. And it made absolute sense. I was just one of many nail salon kids in that salon. I'm trying to imagine you at 10, taking orders, taking phone orders,

you know, running the call in shots, basically as a 10-year-old. You mentioned something, though, just briefly, that you're, your grandmother had schizophrenia. Is this the grandmother that we were talking about earlier? Yes, yeah, yeah. She developed it early on and it got worse and worse. And it was undiagnosed for a long time. You know, we didn't really, it wasn't clear until the last 10 years of her life when she finally got diagnosed.

But, you know, it's interesting. We just lived with it. And we made up, my mother and our family made up. When you don't know something, you make. it up. And she said, well, she's talking to spirits. She's tuned in. They turned it into a power, which is both like really beautiful but also really sad, you know, like they just didn't have the, the means to get a diagnosis. They also fear doctors, you know, tremendously. It was, they thought they would, they would go into the hospital and it would change them that they would leave something

behind. And, you know, given the history of people of color and the medical system and this country, they're not that wrong, right? Their fears are often justified. But we dealt with it as best as we can. And meanwhile, schizophrenia is not new, whether you have the name or not. And so it was something very, you know, we experience in Vietnam as well. We just didn't have the medical term. It's not the first time I've heard that, that when people experience schizophrenia or some sort of mental illness or bipolar disorder that in some cultures and in some communities, that person is seen as a portal to another world. And even now, I mean, I'd just think, well, what if it is schizophrenia and she had that power?

It could still be both, right? I mean, because she would talk to people and she's like, well, there's uncle, you know, Tran, who died years ago. He wants to tell me something. I'm like, well, who's the same? She's wrong. I mean, we know that despite all of our science, you know, hospice nurses, say, I think it's 80% of the people who die under their watch see loved ones. At the end, they visit at the end.

I've heard that over and over also. Yeah, so I'm very open-minded about it. I said, just because I have the medical term doesn't preclude the possibility that she did have something much more. It wasn't just an illness or a hindrance to her life, but maybe it came with both. Ocean, you have an interesting resume. You have had some interesting jobs in your life beyond taking appointments at the nail salon. When you were a young teen, you worked at a tobacco farm. Was that right outside of Glastonbury where you lived? Yes. I lived in this place called the village, and it was a low-income. HUD housing section of Glassonbury, the more unsavory term that people referred to it colloquially was the ghetto. And you had to enter a lottery to get there. And it was the majority

of the population of color in Glass and Berry lived in this village, this complex. Did they call it the projects? Pretty much. Yeah, the projects, the ghetto. I mean, a lot of folks, fought against it in town. They didn't want that there. And so, but that area, the Connecticut River Valley is surrounded by tobacco farms. Bradley International Airport is on top of a former tobacco farm. Who knew? Yeah, you think it's Virginia, North Carolina? No, we have, and we still have a lot of tobacco here. It's used to wrap cigars. And in fact, it's responsible for the immigrant communities of color in Hartford, particularly Jamaicans, Haitian, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans, all of whom were given visas to come to the states to work the tobacco farms during World War II

when the labor supply was off fighting the war. And so again, like, we're in a very similar conversation that we're having now about immigration, labor force, and who actually runs this country in its economics. And this is often a forgotten history of Connecticut. We think of private schools, we think of Yale, we think of Greenwich mansions, but we actually often don't talk about the heart of it, which is run by black and brown immigrants in this country. And so by the time I got there, most of the Haitian Jamaicans were no longer there, but migrant workers from Latin America were there. So I worked right alongside those folks. We were paid in cash, $9.50 an hour at a time where the minimum wage was $7.50.

This was miraculous money. And I did it every year since age 14 all the way to 17, every summer. Backbreaking work. But when you're a teenager, you don't feel it. I'll feel it now, but I didn't feel it then. Were you picking tobacco, rolling tobacco, hanging tobacco? So this is harvest. And so you start was called the horse.

I was a picker. And so you had this thing called the horse, which is a, a kind of like a cart with a detachable spear pushed to the head of it. And you have a metal spear you put to a plank and then you take the tobacco and you pierce the stem through the spear into the plank. Once that's filled, you remove the metal spear. You take the wrap and then you bring it to the tractor. You keep doing that until the tractor fills up with racks of tobacco.

The tractor goes off to the shed. which is a barn, but we call it the shed. And then there are workers, the tallest workers would be standing on the beams. People died, you know, falling from these heights. And they would carry their racks by hand all the way up and dry them in the shed. And you would just do this until the field is completely harvested. And then there was a cut team with machetes that would go out about 30 minutes ahead

to cut it and then let it start to wither and try. But each row would have four horses, those carts, and then each team would have anywhere from four to five pickers, and there would be one person stabbing the racks through. And we did that from 7 a.m. all the way to 4 or 5. That experience watching you describe it, you just didn't talk about it. You relived that. We were watching you. I can do it in my sleep.

Yeah, it's clear, it's clear that that still lives inside you. There's something about working close to the land that changes you. I asked the kitchen that lives inside you. Did that experience live inside you in some way, just still live inside you? Oh, God, that's such an astute question. You know what? No one has asked me this. But I think there's a reason why so much of my world.

is invested in the description of nature because some of my fondest memories is working on those farms. It's so beautiful. You hear the river nearby. You see the jack rabbits. You can smell the chloroform, the chlorophylled, almost bleached-like smell

of the tobacco stocks being cut down and the juice and the iron of the dust, the sun smoking through as the sun descends into the evening, and then you'd all climb on a pickup truck, you know, with all these grown men, and they'll ride you to the next field, and you do it all over again with your buckets and axes. And it felt very ancient in a way

because the world was so far that we even have radios, you know. And then sometimes you would see someone, a machete accidentally cut a rabbit in the middle of that. So I remember seeing the dead rabbits. It was just all of life. But I think that the brutal beauty of it really stuck to me. And I remember my hands the first week I didn't have gloves. I just was so naive.

You know, my hands were completely black. It looked like I went home and my mother said it looks like the bottom of a rice pot that burned. You know, such a, I'm telling you, she's the first poet. I'm just following along. But she's like, gosh, it looks like burnt rice. You know, the sap, dark and everything. And, you know, I never, no one asked me that, but I think that's 100% right because so much of my work is interested in land and how land is also history and how land is also political. Yeah, I could just see that when you, when you talked about it.

When you were working, was your mom making your lunch for you? No, no. She was already be in a nail salon. Or sometimes she would go first or I would go first. Often when I did the farm work, I would go first. I would wake up at six and I had to ride my bike. And that would take 45 minutes or so. And you just grab whatever sandwich, you know, hot pockets.

You just, you know, you're a teenager. But then at the farm, the migrant workers lived on trailers in the forest because they were not documented. So they had to hide themselves in the forest. forest. And so there was a trailer park, a camp in the forest. And the migrant workers lived in there. And they would cook, usually huge vats of eggs, you know, taco bars, you know, like, so they would bring that to the shed during the breaks. And we would all have this kind of communal lunch. And again, it's just some of the most fortifying experiences of my life. It's hard not to listen to this and not think about what's going on today right now.

with people being rounded up, people who are working very hard. If you're describing this today, I'm thinking about the farm right now, and it probably has workers, and they're probably living and working in fear. Well, yeah, I just want to comment on the situation now with migrant workers. And it's just, you know, it was so touching to me because in a way, like, I would, was still privileged, even though I worked with them. I was still privileged. I had citizenship. I had, my mother was working a job. My stepdad was working in a factory. But these men, they were all men, you know, when we talked to them in whatever little English they had,

you know, they were just trying to save up to get their daughters to go to dental school, to get a little, you know, farm for themselves. Like it was the most, the dream that everybody has for their children. And the price of that work was so costly because they would have to follow the crop. They weren't just, you know, tobacco is such a hard, skillful job. But they weren't just tobacco harvester. They harvest asparagus. They harvest cherries, almonds. And every single one of those job is like a different vocation with a different skill set, different parts of your body. And they were some of the most talented, innovative people I've ever met. And to me, it's galling for the politicians in this country to really look at that and say,

we need to round them up and foolishly destroy, you know, a huge portion of this country. Like, we're at the point now where it's ridiculous to say that, you know, this is not part of the American project. It's laborers from all over the world. been here since the very, very beginning, including with Chinese Americans who built the railroads, including stealing bodies from Africa against their will, right? This country is founded on labor from elsewhere, both deliberately and against their will. And so to think that you can kind of somehow sanitize this is a fool's errand. And I think it's so sad to see it with such profound effects now. And a steep hill to climb. I just wrote about this. So I know that 40% of farm workers are undocumented.

And that's, you know, that's a big segment of that population with no real plan for how to replace them. You also worked at a food court in a mall? A fast food restaurant. Yeah. Where did you work? And how does that live inside you? also. It was interesting because the tenement that I lived in, and the reason why I worked under the table, of course, the money was good, but it's because if the rule was that if you made, if your family income exceeded a certain amount, you were no longer eligible to live in government-funded housing. But the gap between subsidized rent and rent on the free.

market was so wide that we would literally be homeless if we had a better job. So, you know, right away, the economic ceiling was so stark and felt for me and my family. And my mother, you know, said, look, you can keep doing the tobacco, but you got to work the rest of the year. And I think the best way to do it is working fast food for a minimum wage so that we can stay under that threshold. So she said, go to McDonald's, go to Burk King. You know, it's many people, I don't know how many people realize this.

Like, you know, the American dream, you would never imagine that your mother fleeing war would sit you down and say, son, please go work at McDonald's. But that's what happened. And so I didn't get into McDonald's. I got into Boston Market. Same pay, you know. And for people who don't know Boston Market, they sell chicken. Rotisserie chicken sort of. New England Thanksgiving food with rotissory chicken, cream, spinach, cornbread, sweet potato pie, comfort food. I think they're on their way out, sadly. But that was a illuminating experience in my life because it was kind of quintessentially American in that I realized that nothing is really cooked. You talk about. You talk about it.

about kitchen. This is all about kitchens. It's hard to say we had a kitchen. We had reheating implements. You take a giant bag of soup or mac and cheese vacuum sealed in a resin sack. You put it under this contraption. You hang it up and then you lower into a vat of boiling water that melts it. you know, within minutes, it comes back out. You open it, you cut it open. It looks like freshly made. You pour it into the hoppers, put it under the golden light. And then you put a little sign that says grandma's mac and cheese.

No grandma involved. And to me, I'm like, what is more American than the great sort of Wizard of Oz of fast food? So there's two images of you cooking at home where it sounds like every, you were cutting herbs, everything was fresh and not relying so much on processed food and then working in a place where things are coming in vacuum sealed bags. What is your relationship to food now? And is it more of what you experienced even in that tenement where you're trying to cook communally or is it something where you're busy? You don't spend a lot of time in the kitchen. You and your partner, is that something that's important to you?

I cook as much as I can. I love it. I took on my mother and grandmother's tendency to not measure. So I take a hard look at a recipe and then shut it down. And then I'm like, all right, I think I got it. And then the rest is just whatever this little hands, these little fingers can guess. Improvise. Yeah.

So I'm like, I want to keep doing this until it tastes right. And so every time I cook, it's still different. And I said, you guys, if you like it, eat it up now because it's never going to taste like this again. But also, you know, it's almost like that cliche. You know how the sausage is made. It's hard to eat it. And boy, you know, I don't want to knock on those places. I don't want to name names.

But it's hard. I've never gone back and eaten in those places. It's just because you can't eat it without knowing what the back room is like, you know. And I'm like, gosh. Gosh, you know, ignorance is bliss. And if you don't know, bless your heart. You don't need to know. But yeah, but on the other hand, you know, in places that I didn't work, I still have a very open relationship.

And maybe you can call it lowbrow relationship to fast food. I'm like, hey, look, you know, KFC, I don't know how it's made. I didn't work there. I don't eat chicken anymore. But I think to me, there's still this kind of American sort of openness to fast food. And I think it's hard to grow out of it because there's so much emotion there, too. As much as we can say this is a corporate, you know, this is sanitized, this is controlled, mass distribution. It's also deeply nostalgic for so many American children.

Oh, yes, yes. Your birthday dinner. your reward after, you know, getting a good report card. Or as you said, I will forever think of KSC as old man's chicken net. You know, because of your first experience, your description of that. There is nothing more glory. There are few things more glorious in this world than a paper crown from Burger King. With a little slot that you put so it fits around your head.

Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. And placed on your head by your mother for your, your birthday. There are a few things, like that little house that the happy meal comes. I thought it was a house. I was like, look at this little house with a toy with a little handle on it. Oh, yeah. So it's real. It's real. The nostalgia is real. They know that. It's engineered to do that for you so that years later you can still smell the french fry and the little apple fritter that's inside and your mind goes straight there. I love that you cook now. I love that you cook now. I love that you cooked for your mother, Rose, when she got sick. Before you published, on Earth,

were briefly gorgeous. Your mom was diagnosed with cancer and you took time to take care of her. And when you talked about love being service, as I understand, caring for her and cooking for her was a big part of that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not even a thought, you know. I can't really take it. I can't really take any credit for it because it wasn't like a decision that I had to fight for. It was just like, oh, I need to take care of my mom. So I'm going to do it in every way I can, including reading her doctor's reports, negotiating with the medical teams, what to do, what not to do, and also preserve her dignity. You know, English has an interesting way of revealing someone's dignity, right? Because when I was not in the room, they would just poke and prod her because she didn't speak English.

And when I came in, I knew to wield it. I had to say, hello, I'm Ocean Vaugh. I'm a professor from UMass Amherst. I'm here to check in on my mother. These little things that you learn to showcase. And of course, it works, right? The doctors stop. They get the kind of like, well, and then they look at me different.

I notice you said, I'm a professor. Yeah. Yeah. How sad it is. But that word, they turn and gives you, the whole shoulders point at you when you say that and then they stop and then they start giving you full sentences rather than brushing you aside or moving past you. It's really interesting. So how many of us have to do that? So many, we have to humanize our elders using this language. But when she got home, you know,

I would make, you know, the main recipe is can juo. You know, the recipe that I brought was canjou and, you know, a lot of folks understand Vietnamese cuisine as far as. Fah, that's a very common one, but Ganyuo is like the ultimate soul food. It's the comfort food. It's faster to make than Fah, it's versatile, it's full of vegetables, and it literally means sour soup. So Geng Ju is sour soup, but it's a sweet and sour soup. You know, you kind of saute the shallots, and the base of it is tamarin and rock sugar, pineapple. You do a taro stocks, okra, tomatoes, bean sprouts, and you eat it with either rice or rice noodles. And then you put fish if you want, shrimp, or you want it vegan, tofu.

And it's kind of the one dish that every region has a kind of like unassailable allegiance to. It's kind of the thing where you say that Gantuo is nowhere like my home village. because our water makes our gandjou, right? It's like New Yorkers talk about bagels, right? Yeah, yeah. I was all about the water in New York. That's where the bagels are supposed to be so good. Yes, I prefer that.

Yeah, so everybody in Vietnam was like, no, it's not like the one in my village because our water is different, right? So it's that is very, very personal dish. And it was a blessing to be able to make that for my mother when she was ill. I love that. I love that you were able to do that for her.

I love that you've shared the recipe with us. I wonder, you say it's not like fa, but one of the things there is that it takes so long to do the broth. You have to keep distilling it so it gets that sort of clear, sharp flavor. I don't want to use the word more forgiving, but does it take less time? Is it a little bit more rustic in that you don't have to strain it in quite the same way? You're actually trying to hold on to some of the gritty, marrowy kind of flavors of the chicken stock or maybe of the roots that you're using to give it that flavor.

A hundred percent. And this is where it's important to bring up Gantuel because a lot of people have this kind of, I think kind of this fettersizing idea of Vietnamese cuisine that, oh, it's slow cooking. It's, you know, takes time. And yes, a lot of it does. But it gives us the impression that none of us like work or everybody just like, all these grandmas just in the kitchen. I'm like, it's, that's, fow is a very special thing. And usually you don't, very few families make it at home. You would go out to a specialist to make it. It's very cheap. You go out, someone, a special fah, you know, a vendor would do it. And that's often where most fah is eaten. But gandjou is a very personal home thing because you can make it under an hour. And it's a lot of

peasants who work in the fields go to it. Because, you know, everyone had to work in the fields. Your mom, your grandma, your grandpa, your brother were all in the field. So someone to make lunch, usually the woman, would lead the field just an hour or so earlier. And then just prep. So you didn't have time to make an eight-hour stock, right? So Ganjuo is quick. And you literally, and I kid you not, you can grab the ingredients on your way from the field to your house.

You can just pick up. You're just picking up a little of this and picking up a little. below that. Yep. Yep. And so it's very efficient. It's, it's robust and it's, it's easy to make. And that's why I really love it. Is it better the next day? It's, why is that? I'm, I am going to write a cookbook one day and it's going to be called better the next day. Because do you know what? Like, why? Why? What is there a science? I think, I guess there's a science. Everything gets to, it's, they get to know each other. They, they frolic together. Everything deepens and, and flavors just kind of

marinate and get to know each other and it just becomes better. Yeah, I mean, I feel that way, but I don't know. I just conditioned to think anything tastes good the next day. So it could be Pavlovian at this point, but it's true,

especially stews and soups. Absolutely. And pastas and pizza and gumbo. Yeah, you're right. Most things do taste better the next day. I want to talk to you the kitchen that you have now. You live in North Hampton, Massachusetts. After your mom passed away, your little brother, Nikki, moved in with you and you and your partner, as I understand now,

live with Nikki all together. Tell me about the kitchen and the place that you live now. And do you keep the door open like you did when you were growing up? Do you invite people in? Do you try to create a communal space? Functionally, my home is still very much that open. collective space because I still live just close to Hartford and Northampton. My family is up and down the Connecticut River still. And they come over and they just use whatever they need to use. It's a communal space. They have keys in my house. There's no border. Like I'm in the studio I built, you know, and there's a little kitchen here. But this is because my aunt will one day be in here when she gets too old. This is in my backyard. My aunt will be here. You know, her children

we'll probably move in here. So we still have a very village mentality. And thanks to the work that I do, I'm able to support nine members of my family because of it. But the function is still very much the same. I love that your family is still close. I honor you for ordering your steps such that you're already contemplating who you will be taking care of years from now. Good on you for having family members who have keys. Not all of us do that. I had to give it to them. We're also going to climb to the window. Oh, okay. So there's no keep in the mouth. They were coming one way or another. And I have loved talking to you. I road test all the recipes. I can't wait to try yours.

I am so glad that we had this conversation. I love your work. I congratulate you on your success. You use words in such a beautiful way to help us not just understand your life. but this crazy, complex, beautiful, and sometimes brutal, that world that we live in. Thank you, Michelle, and thank you for everything that you curated. And thank you for your attention and care in this conversation.

Ocean, it's been great. All the best to you. You too. Thank you. Before we say goodbye, a reminder that our inbox is always open. We would love to hear stories about your mama's kitchen. Recipes, memories, maybe thoughts, on some of the previous episodes,

you can make a voice memo or you can take a video of yourself and send that to us at YMK at Higher Ground Productions.com. And when you send that to us, there may be a chance for your voice to be featured on a future episode, maybe your video to be featured

now that we're also airing these episodes on YouTube as well. And if you're interested in making Ocean's Recipe, you can find that at our website at your mama's kitchen.com. When you go there, you will find all the rest of, piece from all the previous episodes. There's a lot of good stuff there. You can even find some

tips on specialty menus. So make sure and check that out. And also make sure and check us out again next week because we here are always serving up something special. Until then, be bountiful.