I really don’t want to romanticise the difficulties, because there are other difficult things: working in a nail salon, working in factories. But would I want my child, if I had one, to be a writer? No. I would want them to just have a job and live a rich life of examination without having the pressure to make anything out of examination. I think the pressure of making sometimes ruins the endeavour of understanding. To examine life simply to enrich one’s livelihood or one’s personhood for no other end: that’s actually the harder endeavour. It’s perhaps the more holy endeavour. There’s always something that haunts the writer, in that they’re trying to see what can come out of this. Something happens to you when you look at the world not so much for what it could be, or how perfect it is as it is, but for what it could potentially be turned into. I think ultimately it might be better not to be a poet. My career might be just as a teacher. That I can do again and again. I go by this Zen idea that what is not constructed, can’t be deconstructed. To me, the notion of a writer is a construction that I’ve never really embodied. People can call me what they want, but I’ve never really lived in that construction. I am someone who has written and that’s it. Right now, I’m nothing until I can go into another project. If there’s nothing else, if there’s no other books from here on out, that’s okay.
Ocean Vuong
