Summary
Chapter 11
Grazina addresses Hai as Sergeant Pepper. This is a symptom of the waning efficacy of her medication. She adds a third narrative to the mix of her fantasy-world by discussing her mother and childhood friend named Marta. Marta is given the nickname of "owl-girl." A local boy teaches Marta how to swim before he enlists in the Lithuanian Liberation Army. However, he tragically drowns before his deployment. Hai, exhausted from staying up late with Grazina, asks what happened to Marta in the end. She tells him "nothing" and gives him an envelope with thousands of dollars. Hai decides to keep it.
Chapter 12
After a particularly strenuous shift, Hai and Russia sit together and smoke cigarettes. Russia compliments Hai's army boots and tells him about his cousin's friend, who was deployed in Afghanistan. The friend, who they called Dumbass Rob, was a meth addict who could not adjust to civilian life. Hai admires Russia while he talks. Russia is not attractive, but Hai briefly desires him all the same. Hai asks about Russia's sister, Anna, who is in rehab in New Hampshire. Russia works at HomeMarket and FedEx in order to pay for Anna's recovery. He tells Hai a story about a man from his father's village who mysteriously disappeared one night and was never found again. At the end of the chapter, Russia jokes that he might get himself drafted just to acquire a pair of army boots.
Chapter 13
While Grazina naps one day, Hai stumbles across three bottles of Dilaudid, a painkiller. Hai relies on them to get through his shifts at HomeMarket. He recalls the way that a nurse at the New Hope Recovery Center "pray[ed]" him out when he was discharged. Instead of going home upon being discharged from rehab, Hai pays a visit to his drug dealer, Randy. After acquiring drugs, Hai gathers the courage to "break his mother's heart again," but finds he is unable to face her. He cannot explain how Noah's overdose (so soon after his Bà ngoại’s death) sent him spiraling into addiction, leading him to drop out of school. When Hai first returned home, disgraced after dropping out of college, his mother accused him of always being a selfish child. With all these memories haunting him, Hai takes a painkiller.
Hai, Russia, and Maureen help Wayne pack meat for extra cash one Sunday. Upon arriving at the warehouse, the crew finds out that Wayne means for them to work as butchers. Hai focuses on the animals' ears as he kills them to distance himself from the grueling task. Adding to the chaos of the situation, Hai receives a phone call from his mother, who still believes he is away at med school. Hai admits to Wayne that he is lying to his mother, and Wayne tells Hai about not being in contact with his own son, Knight. The butchers do not end up making the quota, but Wayne pays Russia, Hai, and Maureen $50 each. They clap to ward off negative energy. Hai forgets to pray for the pigs' souls despite his mother's request for him to do so.
Chapter 14
Chapter 14 resumes Hai's memory of going to McDonald's with his family after touring the Stonewall Jackson Museum. He and Sony debate the value of imagination and fantasy while their mothers and grandmother sit nearby, laughing. The boys examine Sony's new Stonewall Jackson coloring book. Meanwhile, in the present, Hai waits for Sony after his appointment with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist prescribes antipsychotics and gives Hai a brochure called "Your Neuro-atypical Teen: The Next Five Years." Not knowing what to do, Hai hugs Sony and reassures him that the psychiatrists are trustworthy experts. Just as Sony requested when they were kids, Hai rides his bike and chants, "this is not a spaceship" on their way home.
Chapter 15
Winter begins. A few days before Christmas, BJ's mother brings in a lasagna for the crew at HomeMarket to enjoy. A few regulars remain, eating their meals. BJ performs a set of her heavy metal singing, which feels surreal to Hai. Maureen gifts Russia and Hai an inaccurate model of R2-D2 made by her son, Paul, before he died. Russia points out its phallic appearance.
After their shift, Sony and Hai bike to a business called Bryon's Insta-Bail. Their plan is to use Grazina's money combined with the small portion that Sony saved in order to pay his mom's bail. At the last moment, Hai cannot handle betraying Grazina, and he only takes out half of the full amount. Sony forgives Hai for apparently not being able to count properly. He tells Hai that his father (who he idolizes) has a diamond embedded in his hand after surviving a Vietcong attack. When Sony was bullied as a child, his father once heard about it and showed the boys his hand as a way to stop them from taunting Sony.
Analysis
Hai continues to engage in imaginative storytelling with Grazina, but he is becoming exhausted. According to experts, preventing burnout involves setting boundaries, managing stress through mindfulness, taking care of one's essential needs, asking for help, taking breaks, and cultivating interests outside of obligation. However, these strategies are not accessible to Hai in his current situation. He must continue working at HomeMarket to earn an income, and he cannot abandon Grazina. For these reasons, Hai continues to juggle his responsibilities at the cost of his own health. This influences him to make the morally questionable decision to pocket Grazina's money when she offers it to him during a period of disorientation.
Stories of people disappearing without a trace come up twice in these chapters, underscoring the theme of ghosts in the novel. Grazina shares a story about a childhood friend of hers named Marta, whom she refers to as an "owl-girl" (Chapter 11). When Hai asks what happened to Marta, Grazina simply says, "'[n]othing,'" an answer that Hai refuses to accept (Chapter 11). Grazina goes on to explain, "'Who knows what happens to owls that are too fat to fly. Maybe they swim...She was just a girl from long ago. No one remembers her but me'” (Chapter 11). The human need for closure and resolution also emerges in Russia's retelling of a man from his father's village who disappeared one night. Russia speculates that "'[p]eople vanish all the time and leave no trace, even here in America'" (Chapter 12). No one is safe from the possibility of disappearing, as can be seen in the unsolved murder case of Rachel Griotti.
Hai deludes himself into thinking that he is in control of his addiction when he finds Grazina's bottles of painkillers. He compares his drug use to the way "Wayne nursed his bourbon from his pistol-shaped flask between racks of chicken," showing how prevalent drug and alcohol dependency is in this community (Chapter 13). Hai considers how the nurses who treated him in rehab did not always "end up hardened from seeing endless hordes of ravaged human forms whose warped faces upon closer inspection often revealed a neighbor or a friend" (13). Nearly a dozen high school classmates of Hai's, including Noah (his possible love interest), overdosed on fentanyl. Surrounded by these circumstances, Hai cannot escape addiction even when he leaves home.
Marketing lies and false appearances consistently appear in The Emperor of Gladness, exposed from the perspective of working-class people whose labor sustains the illusion. When Wayne offers the HomeMarket team an opportunity to make extra cash at a meat-packing warehouse one weekend, Russia, Hai, and Maureen witness the reality of a supposedly free-range and organic pork farm (Chapter 13). The animals are forced to stand in crowded pens (making them "free range"), fed massive quantities of organic corn that ferments their blood to the point of needing antibiotics (making the meat "organic"), and slaughtered in a mud field (making them "humanely...field killed"). Hai contrasts the docile appearance of supermarket meat wrapped in plastic packages with the disturbing reality of slaughterhouses.
Hai strives to support Sony, but ultimately he cannot do so at Grazina's expense. This can be seen when Hai makes the last-minute decision not to use the money Grazina's husband left her in order to pay for Aunt Kim's bail. Although Grazina insisted that Hai take the money, this gift was given under ambiguous circumstances because Grazina was delusional. In that momentary loss of her present reality, Grazina was convinced that Hai was a sergeant who could use the money to get them to safety from a war zone. Past wars leave real remnants and also exist metaphorically in the present, but Hai understands that using Grazina's money could violate the trust between them. In this instance, he chooses to honor a member of his found family over helping his relative because it is the moral and ethical thing to do.
