Deindustrialization in the Northeast spawned a service sector that didn’t quite match up to the offerings of the old, manufacturing-based economy. The resulting lower wages, limited job benefits, and reduced job security propelled many workers, their families, and communities into a downward spiral.
Two great regional storytellers — Russell Banks and Richard Russo — plowed this field with great personal insight. Both endured difficult childhoods, marked by absent or unreliable blue-collar fathers who left single moms in charge. In their short fiction and novels, both Banks and Russo chronicled the tragedies and tribulations of white working-class people living in hometowns like their own.
In works by Banks like Hamilton Stark, Affliction, and Rule of Bone or Russo’s The Risk Pool, Empire Falls, and Nobody’s Fool, we meet pipe fitters and laborers, leather factory workers, auto mechanics and small-town cops, grill cooks and waitresses, and even the occasional failed academic.
Their fictional world contains few characters and plots of the politically uplifting sort favored by promoters of proletarian literature the 1930s. Late twentieth-century working-class life in the Northeast did not lend itself to such heroic narratives. It was a time of downward mobility after lost strikes, layoffs, plant closings, and the replacement of stable blue-collar jobs with far more precarious ones.
In tumble-down houses, battered by cold winters, cross-generational family dysfunction worsened. People got divorced, went bankrupt, and left town. In the works of Banks and Russo, even the human company and liquid solace found in local bars and diners becomes a mixed blessing. Because in the authors’ fictional rendering of those gathering places, irascible regulars can explode at any moment, directing bitterness or disappointment over life and work at others equally unhappy.
Thanks to immigration, the demographics of the region have changed considerably; workers born abroad account for more than half of New England’s population growth in the last fifteen years. So now, fittingly enough, a new literary voice has emerged from the ranks of a more diverse low-wage workforce faced with the same job precarity as older native-born workers.
How members of this “new” and “old” working class interact — amid shared economic hardship, fraying family and community ties, but with the life raft of workplace friendship to sustain them — is beautifully rendered, warts and all, by Ocean Vuong in his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness.
Vuong is a thirty-six-year-old Vietnamese immigrant currently employed as a tenured professor of writing at New York University. He’s also a leading poet and past recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (aka “genius grant”). Just a decade and a half ago, he was not collecting accolades in the rarified world of literary fiction or philanthropy. He was struggling to support himself and his family — as a fast-food server and home health aide.
Workers in those two essential occupations now number nearly 4.5 million nationwide. Vuong is the only one among them (so far) to turn his formative experience doing food prep at Boston Market and Panera, plus several years of elder care for a Lithuanian woman in her eighties, into the brilliant core of a 400-page novel.
What feats did Vuong — like Banks and Russo before him — have to perform to end up on the academic track and turn his experiences into such moving fiction? Vuong’s upbringing was even more difficult than their own, many decades before and further north.
Vuong grew up in public housing in East Hartford, just across the Connecticut River from the capital of a state ranked among the richest in the United States, with some of the highest levels of income inequality. His late mother was a manicurist, whose father was a US soldier. She became a post–Vietnam War refugee, bringing her son to America when he was two years old.
Before Vuong’s youthful foray into the service sector, he spent long summer days working for cash under the table at a local tobacco farm; because he didn’t have a car, that required a five-mile bike ride each way. His stepfather went to work for an auto-parts company; Vuong’s brother became a longtime employee of Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“Where I’m from,” Vuong says, “reading itself is a class betrayal. Oh, you’re too good for us. You’re trying to read to go to college. You’re trying too hard to get out.”
The author did eventually “get out” by embracing not only reading but also writing — habits shared, not surprisingly, by his fictional alter ego in The Emperor of Gladness. When we first meet nineteen-year-old Hai in the book, he’s a depressed, pill-popping college washout who’s afraid to go home and tell his mother that he’s failed her immigrant dreams of a better life for the next generation.
He’s about to kill himself by jumping off a railroad bridge, when Grazina Vitkus, an eighty-two-year-old widow from Lithuania who lives alone, sees him and talks him down. Due to multiple ailments, including incipient dementia, her mind and body are deteriorating as rapidly as her century-old house; it’s such a dump that no caregiver wants to stay with her overnight. That situation changes for the better when Hai, in need of shelter and a job, becomes her live-in helpmate.
Their partnership of convenience becomes a deep cross-generational friendship, rooted in hilariously disjointed discussions of life, history, great books, and their shared experience of family estrangement. The emotional labor involved in caring for Grazina is considerable; she suffers from flashbacks and nightmares from traumatic experiences in war-torn, famine-stricken Eastern Europe. Plus Grazina is barely able to put food on the table now. So when the balance on her EBT card nears zero, Hai cycles off to land a day job to keep their household afloat financially.
Hai reconnects with his cousin Sony, who is now living in a group home for “neuro-atypical teens” while his mother is in jail. In a standard-issue uniform and cap from “HomeMarket” (as Boston Market is called in the novel), Sony earns $7.15 an hour as a valued team member at its “third best grossing outlet in history.” While serving up roast chicken and mash potatoes to go, Sony has become well known for his detailed, nonstop monologues about Civil War generals and their battles, delivered as if the war between the states is still occurring, down south, at that very moment.
“He’s ‘artistic,’ one protective coworker explains to customers puzzled by this behavior — a product of either being on the spectrum or a form of assimilation via obsessive emersion in the minutia of American history. Grazina displays a similar blend of linguistic confusion and personal tolerance when she learns about Hai’s sexual orientation. She quickly assures him that she has no beef with “the Liggabit community.”
With his cousin vouching for him, Hai joins the millions of workers, past and present — at Boston Market, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Burger Chef, Subway, Panda Express, and Pizza Hut — “who lord over nothing but a stainless-steel counter and its crumb-specked dominion.” Because it is their lot to stand behind that counter “saying again and again, ‘How can I help you?’ to an endless stream of impatient customers seeking “reheated chemically preserved sustenance.”
The Emperor of Gladness provides the best backstage tour of how the “quick-service restaurant sector” functions, at the micro level, since Eric Schlosser’s journalistic exposé in Fast Food Nation, twenty-five years ago. We learn that, at this fictional chain, making dinner by hand “means heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago at a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum-sealed in industrial resin sacks.”
When Wayne, the African American “Chief of Rotisserie” at the outlet lands a side gig on a nearby farm, he recruits Sony, Hai, and other coworkers to help him earn a $1,500 bonus for slaughtering hogs in time for the holiday season rush. Their bloody, bone-chilling experience “working meat,” as Wayne calls it, plunges them into a nightmarish Connecticut Valley version of The Jungle 120 years ago.
Hidden from the road, next to the barn was a long tarp tent the size of a car wash, the sides covered all the way to the ground. It looked like the Civil War hospitals Sony is always talking about. As they approached, a swell of death metal music started filling the air. . . . Wrapping around the tent’s perimeter was a rusty chain link fence that prevented hogs from bolting once they realized they were doomed for the chandeliered-dinner tables of millionaires. The plastic sign, zip-tied to the chain link, read: “Murphy’s Free-Range Pork: A Family Farm Since 1921.”
Fortunately for Hai, his regular workplace, like Grazina’s crumbling abode, turns out to be a true haven in a heartless world. His diverse crew of coworkers may not be serving up previously frozen dinners at the faster industrial pace demanded by their whip-cracking regional manager — or doing so with a small enough crew — but they are pretty good at helping each other out, on the job and after work.
The high turnover rate in the fast-food industry means that most people move on sooner rather than later. The Emperor of Gladness has no big happy ending but some hints of a better life ahead for Hai and his old teammates.
His female manager, BJ, who is built like a Samoan wrestler and aspires to become “the next Rikishi,” rebounds from a disastrous debut in the arena to “become New England Regional Women’s Tag Team Champion” (while managing another HomeMarket outlet).
Wayne “moves back to North Carolina to start a smokehouse called The Knighthood.” Sony raises enough cash, with Hai’s help, to bail his mother out of jail; reunited they go to work at a local ravioli factory, while Sony studies at night to become a docent at a Civil War museum.
Russia, a coworker from Tajikistan, has similar success saving enough money to get his drug-addled sister into rehab. Their hard-drinking friend Maureen, a former elementary school aide and mother of three, needs surgery for cancer and ends up in a wheelchair living with her brother’s family.
Lucas Vitkus, Grazina’s selfish white-collar son — who lives in a fancy condo with his own family — still wants little to do with his mother. So Lucas decides to sell her house and evict Hai, her loving and devoted one-man “memory care” unit. Over Grazina’s objections, she is carted off to an Alzheimer’s facility, where she dies six months later during an afternoon nap.
At the novel’s end, Hai’s own future is uncertain. He’s still calling his own mom at her nail salon to deceive her about his continuing separation from higher education. But he’s not peering over the side of railroad bridges anymore. Readers have reason to believe that Hai will make the best of his second chance at life. And like his resilient creator, he’ll find a way to “get out” of poverty and precarity, without forgetting what both mean for millions of our fellow Americans.
Great Job Steve Early & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
