Can there be kindness without hope?

Every once in a while, you are blessed to read a book that has a profound effect on your life. It may not be the cosmic shifts that happen as a teenager reading Fountainhead or the Handmaid’s Tale for the first time. But it’s an effect that alters you, makes you think, resonates so deeply that all you can do is emote. You laugh, cry, and feel all the in-betweens. And at the end, you are left wondering what just happened? What beauty did I just read?

I finished Ocean Vuong’s Emperor of Gladness last week. I immediately shared it with friends without fully appreciating its impact on me. A week later, I’m still mulling over the book because of its stark depiction of reality. In listening to Ocean (I’m using his first name because I just love the story behind it. Non sequitur- Ocean was renamed by his mother after she divorced his father to reclaim her independence. She chose Ocean because like the Pacific Ocean, they neither reside in the United States nor Vietnam. Ocean belongs to the Ocean. What a befitting name for a poet) on the Modern Love podcast, I was mesmerized by how feeling he was. How raw his emotions were and how vulnerable he was to the audience.

After reading the book, I was confused. Most of the time, it is clear what lessons the author wants to impart on their readers. In this book, it was less clear. Perhaps it was in this confusion, in this not knowing, where the magic really lies. One word kept coming back to me throughout reading this book. Kindness. In each of the bizarre and strange situations that the characters found themselves in, one personality trait came through again and again. That they were all intrinsically good people. When tested with their realities that included poor working conditions and pay in fast-food chains, drugs, crime and prison stints or untreated mental health issues in the town of Gladness, CT, these characters including the main character Hai all exhibited kindness. It wasn’t the type of kindness that comes with privilege, the kind that comes easily to those who have much. It was the kindness that comes from only having nothing to gain. Kindness that has no reward but for the deed itself. It was in these moments that Vuong’s poetry shined and the reader is left with the gift of the beauty of the written word.

After listening to the Modern Love podcast, I came to understand that the question that has plagued Vuong is whether one can be kind without hope. This was a book, as Vuong describes, without an “improvement arc.” However, I would wholeheartedly disagree. The truth is that the main character Hai does improve. Not with riches or with fame. But in his understanding of himself and the world. That all that one really has in the end is how one thinks about oneself. One can redeem oneself with their actions, however small. And it is in this kindness, in this improvement to one’s soul, that the reader and the characters can indeed hope for a better future.