The Ghosts of East Gladness
Ghosts populate East Gladness, and their presence seems just as (if not more) vivid to Hai as that of the living. In Chapter 1, the narrator (a broad, third-person perspective) describes how ghosts "rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing's mouth." This represents the remnants of what cannot fade or be forgotten, highlighting the theme of memory. To the eyes of the rest of the world, the residents of East Gladness themselves are like ghosts. The collective voice in Chapter 1 informs the reader that "We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings." In Chapter 18, Hai tells Sony that his "ghost is in pieces." When Hai gives Sony his life savings and climbs into a dumpster at the end of the novel, he fades from the realm of the living and enters a liminal, ghostlike space.
Urban and Nature Overlap
There is no clear boundary between the town of East Gladness and the ecology present long before human infrastructure was built. While introducing East Gladness in Chapter 1, the narrator describes how "In spring the cherry blossoms foam across the county from every patch of green unclaimed by farms or strip malls." The narrator proceeds to call the reader's attention to nature, an essential aspect of the town's character. This can be seen in the passage, "look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks. How the last crickets sing through fog hung over pastures pungent now with just-laid manure" (Chapter 1).
Vuong also writes in deep time, employing a scale that stretches far beyond the novel's epoch but nonetheless reaches into the present. This is illustrated in the passage, "[h]ugging the river beyond are slabs of sandstone pocked with Podokesaurus footprints, made over 195 million years ago, running right up to the Wendy’s parking lot." Time accumulates, causing the narrative to unfold in layers like sediment. The author relies on flashbacks to fill in the missing pieces, such as when Hai recalls the times he spent with Noah. They spent many hours together in nature: beneath the stars, running through tobacco fields, and walking through back lots and junkyards (Chapter 20).
Biblical Imagery
The novel is filled with biblical imagery, reflecting the dominant Christian belief system in East Gladness. While introducing the town and its residents in Chapter 1, the narrator states that the moss that grows there against all odds transforms the townspeople into what they "were becoming all along: biblical.” Faith is as central to the addiction rehabilitation center as psychological interventions are. This can be seen in the way that Hai recalls nurses praying for him when he checked himself into the New Hope Recovery Center (Chapter 13). Hai's own faith appears in passages such as when he asks if people were "even human until God opened us at the mouth" (Chapter 7). He also recalls being moved by a pair of men "kneeling in the snow...saying the Lord’s name over and over" (Chapter 13). For Hai, this "was the strangest and most graceful prayer he’d ever seen," which indicates that Hai believes the divine is accessible to ordinary people (Chapter 13).
Macabre Imagery
Disturbing depictions of death (particularly those that highlight horrifying results of violence) permeate the novel. The most graphic occurs when Hai, Russia, and Maureen accompany Wayne to a slaughterhouse to help him earn a holiday bonus. There, Hai is overwhelmed by the "blood-soaked air," the pigs "thrashing and screaming in the mud," the "grass dyed yellow with stomach viscera," the "torqued and anguished gurgling," etc. (Chapter 13). Over time, Hai comes to identify with the hogs in that they symbolize the exploitation of the vulnerable.
Another example of macabre imagery occurs in the descriptions of war. For example, Vuong unflinchingly addresses the treatment of Vietnamese soldiers and citizens when Hai and Sony watch war movies (Chapter 20). Hai considers "how easily a face is disfigured in the abstraction a pile of bodies so naturally makes" (Chapter 20).
