Top Highlights

• will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear.
• The confessional lyric didn’t seem right because my pain felt singled out, exceptional, operatic, when my life is more banal than that. I also couldn’t write traditional realist narrative fiction because I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of ...
• But even as recently as 2016, much of the media ignored Vuong’s queer identity because it didn’t fit into their image of the tragic Vietnamese refugee. In multiple interviews, Vuong is asked to rehearse his shattering experiences of refugee impoverishment
• He reassures the public that he has not only sung but lived through his libretto of hurt so that his poetry and biography have become welded into a single American myth of individual triumph.
• Humor was a form of survival, since it created necessary psychic distance from slavery. It was also a secret code to an underground world where the master was not only outside it, but the object of ridicule. In his essay “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ralph Ellison writes that when whites heard black laughter, they were left with “the baffled gener...