18 pages • 36 minutes read
Ocean VuongAubade with Burning City
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
The Vietnam War was a 20-year battle for control of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Widely regarded as a proxy war of the Cold War, the United States began officially providing support to South Vietnam in 1954 as it clashed with communist North Vietnamese forces, who had the backing of the Soviet Union and China. United States involvement in Vietnam swiftly escalated after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, and by 1969, over half a million US troops were stationed in the country. The official 1995 estimate by Vietnam states as many as 2 million North and South Vietnamese civilians and 1 million Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the course of the War.
The United States officially pulled its last military forces from Vietnam in 1973, although it continued to provide aid to the South Vietnamese. The last evacuation of American civilians and personnel in Saigon occurred on April 29, 1975 as North Vietnamese forces began their assault on the city. The South Vietnamese government surrendered on April 30, and on July 2, 1976, North and South Vietnam officially united to become the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Vuong often discusses his complicated relationship with the Vietnam War, calling himself a “product of war” (Armitstead, Claire. “War baby: the amazing story of Ocean Vuong, former refugee and prize-winning poet.” The Guardian, 2017). As he puts it, because his grandfather was a United States soldier and his grandmother was Vietnamese, in a way, he owes his existence to the brutal conflict.
Literary Context
Vuong makes a point in interviews to say that he “[comes] from a long line of poets” (Davenport, Anne Azzi. “Vietnamese American poet contemplates his personal ties to the war.” PBS NewsHour, 2016.). When Vuong was growing up, the women in his household engaged in oral storytelling, a tradition going back many generations. When they lived in Vietnam, Vuong’s family were rice farmers, and they would sing songs in the fields. Those songs contained all sorts of information, and during the war, farmers used them to spread news about where bombs were falling. It doesn’t matter that his family was illiterate—for Vuong, they were the people who taught him how to write.
While much of Vuong’s work has an autobiographical bent, he also makes use of well-known myths. A series of poems in Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) reworks the character of Telemachus, Odysseus’s son in Homer’s ancient epic, The Odyssey. Because Telemachus's father left him, Vuong uses this myth to explore his own father’s absence, what the returned father could be for him, and how he could move forward.
Vuong’s work shares several key features with the Modernist literature movement. The way the speaker in his poems stretches language and reaches for strangeness affects an overwhelmed, awestruck tone. The humble disposition to existential mystery is reminiscent of 19th- and 20th-century writers’ reactions to industrialization, globalization, and worldwide wars. Vuong also shares a critical bent toward dominant Western narratives of history. His choice to focus on colonized peoples in a postcolonial era challenges any assumptions about the benevolence or goodwill of the American empire.
Authorial Context
Vuong learned to read and write slower than his peers; he didn’t read fluidly enough to read chapter books until he was 11 years old. This was due to dyslexia, a condition he believes runs in his family. Now that Vuong works with the written word, he notices how oral storytelling presents a challenge in contemporary poetry. One example he gives is the difficulty of enjambment—in written poetry, line breaks are a key craft feature, but because Vuong’s family never wrote their stories down, he must guess at where they would have broken certain lines.
Vuong also notes the Buddhist influence on his work. His family’s practice of Buddhism was based in rituals. They would pray at an altar each morning, reciting the names of ancestors. These rituals extended into daily life, where the family prioritized a disposition of love and care. The expectation in his house that everyone took their shoes off before entering, he says, demonstrates the importance of action. While his family rarely says the words “I love you,” they would constantly show it with physical touch, acts of service, time spent together, and other methods of caretaking (“Ocean Vuong: A Life Worthy of Our Breath.” On Being with Krista Tippett, 2022.). This spiritual training is why so much of the emotion of Vuong’s poetry is felt, explored, and shown in the body and its actions.
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By Ocean Vuong
