Artifice
Various establishments in the novel work to give the impression of care and support, but in fact exist only to make a profit. For example, HomeMarket, the fast-casual restaurant where Hai works, advertises the feeling of home-cooked Thanksgiving meals despite serving cheap, processed food. Maureen informs Hai that they are selling a lie, especially since BJ secretly adds vanilla cake mix to the corn bread, making it addictive due to added sugar (Chapter 9). Another example is the rehab center where Hai sought treatment before the events of the novel. The New Hope Recovery Center leans heavily on religious imagery, but according to Hai, "a rehab, under God or not, was still a business" (Chapter 5). In other words, the comfort of faith is part of the recovery center's marketing. A third example can be seen in the warehouse and slaughterhouse where Hai, Russia, and Maureen work alongside Wayne one weekend. Hai witnesses the deplorable conditions the animals are kept in despite the meat being presented as "Free Range" and organic (Chapter 13). Overall, these various places create an aura of connection in order to generate a profit.
Hai also experiences dishonesty in his relationships. Hai himself fabricates a medical school acceptance to please his mother. For the entirety of the novel, she remains under the impression that he is attending medical school in Boston when he actually lives and works in East Gladness. Hai is also not the only member of his family to engage in deception. For years, Sony's mother has been pretending to be Sony's deceased father, writing her son letters. She also does not inform her sister that she is incarcerated. These decisions impact the entire family.
Fabrication extends beyond Hai's birth family and into his found family as well. Hai discovers the possibility that Grazina embellished or outright invented certain details she shared about her wartime experience. Overall, the novel does not suggest that characters who lie are bad people, but rather that lying (whether outright or by omission) is a flawed and complex mechanism the characters rely on for various reasons.
Addiction
Where Hai lives in Connecticut, it is easier to access drugs and alcohol than a higher education. The majority of the characters in The Emperor of Gladness use drugs or drink alcohol just to make it through the day. For instance, both Maureen and Wayne drink alcohol during their shifts at HomeMarket. The crew suspects that Amanda, who washes dishes, takes "some kind of downers" (Chapter 5). This is considered normal in East Gladness. Hai himself was only 12 years old when he first witnessed someone overdose (Chapter 6). Addiction ran rampant in his community before ever being labeled as the opioid crisis. At 16, Hai tried heroin, and by the time he went to college, his substance abuse escalated to the point where he had to drop out. Throughout the novel, Hai steals Dilaudid and other painkillers from Grazina's house, convincing himself that he is "in control" of his addiction (Chapter 13). It is ultimately unclear whether Hai overdoses at the end of the book.
Memory
The narrative is structured around Hai's memories and Grazina's fractured chronologies (in which she sees the past reenacted in the present). The act of remembering has both positive and negative implications for the characters. For Hai, the cost of losing oneself to past memories is self-destruction, which can be seen in the quote, "[w]e murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering" (Chapter 6). Grazina constantly loses her hold on her sense of self due to her progressive memory impairment. In a panic, she asks Hai whether she is still herself even if she cannot remember who she was (Chapter 20). Hai never arrives at a definitive answer. When Hai asks Sony if people can live good lives they have no recollection of, Sony affirms the importance of remembering others (Chapter 17). It is a shared responsibility. Sony embodies this belief when, standing at the site where his father died, he honors his father by saying, "'I promise I’ll never forget who you are and everything we talked about'” (Chapter 23). Hai, on the other hand, compares his head to a "coffin to keep the memories of the dead alive" (Chapter 20). Hai seeks outlets in the form of taking painkillers and, eventually, talking to Grazina about Noah.
War
World War II and the Vietnam War haunt the characters in The Emperor of Gladness. Grazina is an elderly Lithuanian woman whose prefrontal lobe dementia causes her to relive traumatic memories of fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. Hai adopts the persona of Sergeant Pepper, an American soldier who helps her navigate the war. Sometimes they engage in mock gunfights, while other times Hai orchestrates an escape. Joining Grazina in her memories is a tactic that Hai utilized while caring for his own grandmother. In both cases, Hai employs storytelling and make-believe as strategies to ease trauma.
Sony uses war to make sense of his feelings of abandonment. He is an ardent Civil War history buff who not only researches prominent figures and strategies, but adopts military language in present scenarios to make sense of things. This can be seen when, arguing with Hai about their family dynamic, Sony says, "'...this country’s falling apart by the seams and I’m out here trying to preserve this, our Union...That’s no way for a country to be, General Hai. There’s no proper decency out here anymore” (Chapter 21). Hai analyzes Sony's sympathy with the South as resulting from being exposed to old war movies growing up. These included depictions of the Vietnam War that dehumanized Vietnamese people.
While playing war games with Grazina, Hai comes to see his current circumstances as a kind of war. At one point, he thinks, "[t]his is nowhere in the middle of their lives, yet closer to death than they’ve ever been" (Chapter 7). Hai battles addiction and stagnant economic opportunities. When he finally reveals his secret grief about Noah's death to Grazina in Chapter 20, he frames it in war terminology. In this way, addiction, poverty, and grief are also depicted as types of wars in the novel.
Working-Class Life
Vuong has spoken in interviews about how upward mobility was impossible for his own family because earning a higher income would result in losing necessary support, such as housing. He depicts the harsh reality of poverty in The Emperor of Gladness. Hai's mother describes her job at a salon as having to "scrub feet" and bow her head to white people all day just to pay for basic necessities like housing and food (Chapter 13). Though Hai was the first in his family to attend college, grief and subsequent addiction led him to drop out. Hai and many of his coworkers at HomeMarket earn $7.15 an hour, which is the minimum wage. Hai remarks that "[t]he folks who made up the crew were just like people anywhere else in New England" (Chapter 5). Vuong highlights how despite their labor and exhaustion, the characters find intimacy and connection. This is evident in their camaraderie during shifts and the way they accompany each other on various outings and adventures.
After spending a day working at a slaughterhouse, Hai comes to identify with the emperor hogs. Bred for the rich and powerful, these hogs live in horrendous conditions only to be slaughtered. This mirrors the way that working-class people are treated as disposable by society.
Chosen Family
After seeking distance from his mother, who believes he is attending medical school in Boston, Hai finds a chosen family with Grazina and his coworkers at HomeMarket. He spends the majority of his time with them, and being a caregiver and member of a team infuses his life with purpose. The HomeMarket crew navigates tumultuous circumstances together, from helping a person who overdosed in the restroom to slaughtering hogs to assisting a freezing homeless man. Hai comes to deeply empathize with his found family. He feels their triumphs and losses as though they are his own. Although the found family dynamic is not permanent, it leaves a significant and lasting impression on Hai, perhaps even saving his life numerous times.
When Hai, BJ, and Maureen embrace a grieving Sony, Hai calls them the "HomeMarket Monster" because their love for each other defies corporate legibility. The "hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect" cause the HomeMarket crew members to become more intimate with each other than even with their families (Chapter 23). In The Emperor of Gladness, human connections break through rigid corporate structures and flourish in unconventional contexts.
The Need for Closure
The need for closure is a profound human desire that in reality does not often get met. In narratology, the word "denouement" refers to the final part of a story in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved. This longing for closure stems from a psychological need for order and meaning following conflict. However, Vuong does not align with a traditional literary denouement in The Emperor of Gladness. Throughout the book, he introduces stories of people who disappeared without a trace. For instance, a retired detective fails to solve a years-old murder case, Russia shares a story his dad recounted about a man from their village who vanished one night, and Grazina concludes a story about a childhood friend by saying that nothing ever became of her. Vuong illuminates the characters' immediate futures (following the events of the novel) more as a continuation of their lives than a conclusion. Hai's fate is uncertain, and the novel's enigmatic ending is open to interpretation.
