Surrendering

By Ocean Vuong

Reading and writing, like any other crafts, come to the mind slowly, in pieces. But for me, as
an E.S.L. student from a family of illiterate rice farmers, who saw reading as snobby, or worse,
the experience of working through a book, even one as simple as “Where the Wild Things
Are,” was akin to standing in quicksand, your loved ones corralled at its safe edges, their arms
folded in suspicion and doubt as you sink.

My family immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990, when I was two. We lived, all seven of
us, in a one-bedroom apartment in Hartford, Connecticut, and I spent my rst ve years in
America surrounded, inundated, by the Vietnamese language. When I entered kindergarten, I
was, in a sense, immigrating all over again, except this time into English. Like any American
child, I quickly learned my ABCs, thanks to the age-old melody (one I still sing rapidly to
myself when I forget whether “M” comes before “N”). Within a few years, I had become uent
—but only in speech, not in the written word.

One early-spring afternoon, when I was in fourth grade, we got an assignment in language-
arts class: we had two weeks to write a poem in honor of National Poetry Month. Normally,
my poor writing abilities would excuse me from such assignments, and I would instead spend
the class mindlessly copying out passages from books I’d retrieved from a blue plastic bin at
the back of the room. The task allowed me to camou age myself; as long as I looked as
though I were doing something smart, my shame and failure were hidden. The trouble began
when I decided to be dangerously ambitious. Which is to say, I decided to write a poem.

“Where is it?” the teacher asked. He held my poem up to the uorescent classroom lights and
squinted, the way one might examine counterfeit money. I could tell, by the slowly brightening
room, that it had started to snow. I pointed to my work dangling from his ngers. “No, where
is the poem you plagiarized? How did you even write something like this?” Then he tipped my
desk toward me. The desk had a cubby attached to its underside, and I watched as the
contents spilled from the cubby’s mouth: rectangular pink erasers, crayons, yellow pencils,
wrinkled work sheets where dotted letters were lled in, a lime Dum Dum lollipop. But no
poem. I stood before the rubble at my feet. Little moments of ice hurled themselves against
the window as the boys and girls, my peers, stared, their faces as unconvinced as blank sheets
of paper.

Weeks earlier, I’d been in the library. It was where I would hide during recess. Otherwise,
because of my slight frame and soft voice, the boys would call me “pansy” and “fairy” and pull
my shorts around my ankles in the middle of the schoolyard. I sat on the oor beside a tape
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 player. From a box of cassettes, I chose one labelled “Great American Speeches.” I picked it
because of the illustration, a microphone against a backdrop of the American ag. I picked it
because the American ag was one of the few symbols I recognized.

Through the headset, a robust male voice surged forth, emptying into my body. The man’s
in ections made me think of waves on a sea. Between his sentences, a crowd—I imagined
thousands—roared and applauded. I imagined their heads shifting in an endless ow. His
voice must possess the power of a moon, I thought, something beyond my grasp, my little life.
Then a narrator named the man as a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I nodded, not knowing why a
doctor was speaking like this. But maybe these people were ill, and he was trying to cure
them. There must have been medicine in his words—can there be medicine in words? “I have a
dream,” I mouthed to myself as the doctor spoke. It occurred to me that I had been mouthing
my grandmother’s stories as well, the ones she had been telling me ever since I was born. Of
course, not being able to read does not mean that one is empty of stories.

My poem was called “If a Boy Could Dream.” The phrases “promised land” and
“mountaintop” sounded golden to me, and I saw an ochre-lit eld, a lushness akin to a spring
dusk. I imagined that the doctor was dreaming of springtime. So my poem was a sort of ode
to spring. From the gardening shows my grandmother watched, I’d learned the words for
owers I had never seen in person: foxglove, lilac, lily, buttercup. “If a boy could dream of
golden elds, full of lilacs, tulips, marigolds . . .”

I knew words like “if” and “boy,” but others I had to look up. I sounded out the words in my
head, a dictionary in my lap, and searched the letters. After a few days, the poem appeared as
gray graphite words. The paper a white ag. I had surrendered, had written.

Looking back, I can see my teacher’s problem. I was, after all, a poor student. “Where is it?” he
said again.

“It’s right here,” I said, pointing to my poem pinched between his ngers.I had read books that
weren’t books, and I had read them using everything but my eyes. From that invisible
“reading,” I had pressed my world onto paper. As such, I was a fraud in a eld of language,
which is to say, I was a writer. I have plagiarized my life to give you the best of me. ♦

Published in the print edition of the June 6 & 13, 2016, issue of The New Yorker.

Ocean Vuong has published the novel “On Earth We’re Brie y Gorgeous” and the poetry
collection “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” which won the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize.
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