It’s a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers’ trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they’re thirtysomething and the Walmart hasn’t changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces.
This introduction does not glamorize the lives of East Gladness residents. Instead, the sudden rapid pacing underscores the way hours turn to days, and days into years that pass in the blink of an eye. What remains constant through the generations is the presence of corporations.
He aims for the mouth because it’s the deepest wound he’s ever seen. No matter how many years the body wrecks itself on the shore of living, the mouth stays mostly the same, faithful through its empty, eternal void. Some call this hunger. Others call it loss. He knows it only as the law. Whole nations have burned from this little oval ringed with teeth. Were we even human until God opened us here, His fingers singeing a place in the lower face so we can say, eyes narrowed at the embered new world, “The fuck?” He aims for the mouth because it opens the way time opens—whatever goes through never returns the same. Like a word. Like a you. Like I said, this is war.
Hai has profound realizations during his war games with Grazina about what it means to be human and alive. The mouth—a cavity for language and making meaning—has the capacity to incite violence. Here, the narrator zooms out to consider humans as a species in the longer horizons of history.
He had imagined these nurses would end up hardened from seeing endless hordes of ravaged human forms whose warped faces upon closer inspection often revealed a neighbor or a friend, but Marylyn was tender with him, with herself. This is her special thing, he decided: to send people home—whatever that meant.
This quote reveals the prevalence of drug use in this particular community. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not officially declare the opioid crisis a national public health emergency until 2017, and this book is set in 2009. Despite the crisis that many healthcare providers may have experienced, this particular nurse remains compassionate.
There was so much space. That’s what wealth is, he realized: to live in a house where all the tools of living are out of sight. There were no brooms or mops or laundry baskets, no endless trays or cubbies for receipts, bills, or pills and keys. Everything, from the counter to the furniture, the side tables to the credenzas—all of it was there for decor, for the pleasure of the eyes and access of the body. Nothing was in the way. It reminded him of homes he’d seen in pharmaceutical commercials.
Hai compares Lucas's home with the places where he grew up, noting how space impacts one's psyche. Living in cramped quarters with others can either foster cohesion or friction depending on peoples' willingness to collaborate. Wealth affords space, but Hai notes something artificial in the atmosphere of Lucas's home.
There are even doctors among them, lawyers, custodians, minor politicians, bureaucratic functionaries, pilots, bakers, and barkeeps, varied stations of life now equalized in the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream: the nursing home, where the past is nothing but what it’s done to you. Where “a home,” like this one, is often a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer—including family—that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?
Aging, like death, is a great equalizer since everyone has no choice but to go through it—if they are lucky. Modernity has changed the way that certain individuals and entire societies view the elderly. The quality of care one receives at a nursing home depends on factors from funding to the personality of employees. By calling nursing homes "fortresses," Vuong suggests that to enter one is to be hidden from the world.
...it was the unseen presence that was most felt. Inside each room, from the fancy set table to the kitchen counter, the knife left on the cutting board beside a sprig of green onion, through the spotless banisters and dressers, the commodes that must be emptied, underwear washed and dried, and then, outside, among the verdant vegetable and flower beds around the property, the carriage that must be driven and tended to, its wheels oiled, horses fed, was the unmarked presence of Jackson’s six slaves, who Hai later learned were Albert, Amy, Emma, and Hetty, along with her two sons, Cyrus and George. Like the fake Vietnamese in The Green Berets, they were everywhere yet nowhere to be found.
While touring the Stonewall Jackson Historical House, Hai notes the lack of acknowledgement of the enslaved people who labored to keep the house in order. These contemporary re-enactments—whether historical or dramatized—erase people of color. Hai names the enslaved people who worked at Stonewall Jackson's home in order to humanize and honor them. This speaks to the theme of memory and how it can pay respect.
"I wonder if I’m just floating up there alone, the only penguin with wings. And I don’t know if I’m ahead of everybody or behind them. You know what I mean?”
Sony shares with Hai a dream he has in which everyone across the country is a penguin, but only Sony can fly. Here, he contemplates whether being different than others is advantageous or detrimental. The significance of this dream can easily be applied to Sony's life in terms of his neurodivergence. Sony and Hai proceed to discuss the benefit of having wings, which Sony says would be wasted on him because he prefers to stay in East Gladness.
Hai watched the Blue Chickie sign spin on its axis as the van lurched back on the road, and thought about that man in Virginia, lying very still on the floor of the walk-in fridge, his soul hovering above him waiting for his shift to end so he could go home. For some reason this reminded him of those emperor hogs, so named not to signify the act of ruling—but to feed the ruler with their lives.
After BJ tells the group about a Blue Chickie employee (who'd had a heart attack) being left in the freezer by coworkers during a chaotic shift, Hai thinks about how working-class people are just cogs in the machine. This reminds him of the hogs that he, Wayne, Russia, and Maureen slaughtered. Emperor hogs are named after those who will eat them, and so they rule nothing, least of all their own fates.
These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy’s hallowed loss—on the clock.
This quote demonstrates Vuong's class analysis in this novel, particularly his focus on how human connection can flourish even in spaces designed to quell it. Physically working side by side for hours on end forges a kind of intimacy that some people may not even have with their family. This is due to the sheer time, proximity, and purpose that unite workers during a shift.
“Don’t you want to go to the new world?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, you don’t have to stay there. You can go deeper into it and see. And maybe you’ll go right through it, like a door. America is just a big old door, okay?"
Hai invites Grazina to internally transform her unwanted circumstances by stepping deeper into the threshold of herself. Departures are chances to experience the unknown. Hai reminds Grazina that even if she cannot control her outer circumstances, she has inner resources available.
