Characters The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong

Grazina Vitkus: The Owl Who Rescued Hai

Overview

Grazina Vitkus is an elderly Lithuanian widow living in East Gladness whose life intersects with the protagonist Hai at a moment of crisis. She is eighty-two years old, suffers from mid-stage frontal lobe dementia, and carries the weight of a brutal WWII past as a refugee. More than a mere caretaker or landlady, Grazina becomes the catalyst for Hai’s tentative return to life. Renaming him “Labas”—the Lithuanian word for “hello”—she forges an unlikely chosen family with a suicidal young man, and together they navigate the wreckage of memory, trauma, and love.

Plot Role and Chronological Arc

Grazina first appears in Chapter 2 when she shouts Hai down from King Philip’s Bridge, preventing his suicide. She immediately leads him into her decaying home, renames him, and initiates a peculiar ritual of crushing dinner rolls with his feet to dispel sorrow. In the chapters that follow, Grazina’s role deepens from that of a rescuer to a dependent:

  • Chapters 3–5: Hai becomes her de facto carer—sorting thirteen daily pills, managing dementia episodes, and learning her history. Those weeks establish their rhythm, punctuated by Grazina’s memory lapses and sudden moments of clarity.
  • Chapters 6–7: Her severe episodes intensify. She hallucinates her dead brother Kristof, confuses Hai with “Sergeant Pepper,” and reveals she fled Lithuania in 1944 as the Red Army advanced. Hai relapses after 47 days of sobriety, underscoring how Grazina’s trauma triggers his own.
  • Chapters 11–12: Grazina entrusts Hai with a tin box containing $4,000—money her husband Jonas left her—and tells the story of Marta the owl-girl, a clear allegory for her own sexual abuse and loss. She asks Hai to use the money to take her to London, part of a shared war fantasy.
  • Chapters 19–21: Her dementia worsens. She falls, is placed in a nursing home, and confuses Hai with Sergeant Pepper before briefly recognizing his grief. Hai and a social worker drive off her son Lucas and the counselor by invoking the Geneva Convention to keep her home.
  • Chapters 23–24: Grazina escapes the nursing home, returns to Hai, but is ultimately taken to a facility as spring begins. Their final scene together involves watching a salamander migration—a moment of wonder before she is forced away.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Grazina’s primary motivation is survival through connection. She rescued Hai not out of charity alone but because she recognized a fellow person at the edge. Her action is instinctual: she shouts him down, drags him inside, and immediately gives him a new name—an act that claims him as her own.

Her dementia reveals contradictory traits. When lucid, she is sharp, sarcastic, and fiercely independent: she calls writers “constipated,” mocks her dead husband’s poet aspirations, and insists she is “the president.” When lost, she becomes a frightened child reliving war trauma, begging Hai to rescue her brother from rubble. These shifts are not weaknesses but evidence of a mind that holds both tender memory and horror.

Grazina is also a hoarder of stories and objects. Her house is stuffed with Jonas’s salvaged junk, her basement holds a secret library, and she draws on her bedsheets to keep nightmares at bay. This compulsion to preserve—even the ugly, the broken, the useless—reflects her deeper need to hold onto a world that has taken everything from her.

Relationships

Hai (“Labas”)

The bond between Grazina and Hai is the emotional core of the novel. They meet as two strangers equally lost: Hai on a bridge, Grazina in her dementia. Their relationship evolves from caretaker/cared-for to something resembling a mother-son dyad, except the roles continually flip. She teaches him survival rituals; he learns to read her body language and soothe her episodes with songs from his own Vietnamese childhood. In turn, Hai finds in Grazina a person who sees him not as a failure but as a “genius” for working at HomeMarket. Their bond is a clear expression of the theme of survival through chosen family.

Lucas (son)

Lucas is Grazina’s surviving child, a scientist who appears only when trying to force her into a care home. He holds power of attorney and is legally her guardian, but their relationship is adversarial. Grazina calls Hai for help, not Lucas. Lucas’s attempts to “help” are perceived by Grazina as being taken to “the camps,” a painful echo of her wartime trauma. The novel presents Lucas as someone who cares but cannot understand his mother’s inner world.

Jonas (husband)

Jonas died in 2004 of a stroke. He was a hoarder, a talker who never wrote his war story, and a man who spent over a decade attempting to translate Slaughterhouse-Five into Lithuanian. Grazina describes him as a “nerd” and a “dick,” yet she preserved his basement library and his money. Her marriage seems defined by a shared, unspoken war experience and a mutual failure to articulate it.

Marta the owl-girl

Though not a living character, Marta is Grazina’s alter ego—the “owl too fat to fly” who floats instead. The story Grazina tells Hai about Marta being sexually abused by a boy who then drowns is an obvious allegory for Grazina’s own past. This is interpretation, but the emotional weight of the story, combined with Grazina’s ownership of hand-drawn sheets from her own childhood, strongly implies that Marta is Grazina’s younger self.

Key Decisions and Consequences

  1. Rescuing Hai from the bridge. This decision saves Hai’s life and transforms hers. It creates the space for their chosen family and ultimately leads to her brief return home from the nursing home.
  2. Renaming him “Labas.” By giving Hai a new name, she overwrites his former identity and claims him. The consequence is that Hai begins to see himself differently, as someone worthy of care.
  3. Giving Hai the $4,000. This act of trust happens during a dementia episode in which she casts him as Sergeant Pepper. Later, Hai uses the money to help his cousin Sony escape an abusive situation. The consequence is that Grazina’s money becomes a tool for love and liberation, even if she does not consciously remember giving it.
  4. Driving off Lucas and the social worker. Grazina and Hai perform a mock war scene to prevent her forced removal. The consequence is a temporary reprieve, but she is eventually taken anyway, highlighting the limits of personal resistance against institutional care.
  5. Accepting her forced departure. In the final chapter, Grazina is escorted to Hamilton Home. She does not fight; instead, she shares a quiet moment with Hai watching salamanders migrate. Her acceptance becomes a kind of grace, acknowledging that some battles cannot be won.

Theme and Symbol Connections

Grazina is the novel’s living embodiment of memory and historical erasure. Her dementia erases the present while preserving the wartime past, making her a walking archive of trauma. The theme of beauty in decay is literal in her house—which is filled with broken objects and dust—and metaphorical in her mind, where beauty and horror coexist.

The owls she collects symbolize wisdom, night, and the “owl-girl” Marta. They are guardians of secret knowledge. The repeated act of crushing dinner rolls with feet is a ritual of transformation, turning industrial food into a shared act of rebellion against sorrow.

The basement library—especially the copy of Slaughterhouse-Five that Jonas was translating—ties Grazina to the theme of trauma and healing. Billy Pilgrim’s unstuck time parallels Grazina’s dementia; both figures are prisoners of war memories that will not stay buried. For more on these connections, see our pages on memory and historical erasure and trauma and healing.

The $4,000 envelope and the tin box represent the theme of deception and truth. Grazina tells Hai the money is for a journey to London, but it is actually a hoard from Jonas, left for her. She uses deception (the war fantasy, the Sergeant Pepper persona) to access truths she cannot otherwise speak. This aligns with the novel’s exploration of how fiction and lies can reveal deeper realities. See deception and truth.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What dementia does Grazina Vitkus have?
    She was diagnosed in summer 2004 with mid-stage frontal lobe dementia. Her medication regimen includes Aricept and Namenda for cognition, paroxetine for hallucinations, and gabapentin for nerve pain.

  2. Why does Grazina call Hai “Labas”?
    “Labas” is a Lithuanian greeting meaning “hello.” Renaming Hai from the word for a greeting is Grazina’s way of claiming him as kin—she literally makes him into a welcome presence in her life.

  3. What is the significance of the owl figurines and the “owl-girl” story?
    The owls represent wisdom, night vision, and the ability to see in the dark—both literal and emotional. The story of Marta the owl-girl is widely interpreted as Grazina’s veiled account of her own childhood sexual abuse and loss. The “owl too fat to fly” is Grazina herself, choosing to float and endure rather than take flight.

  4. Does Grazina genuinely recognize Hai at the end of the novel?
    She fluctuates. In the nursing home scene she confuses him with Sergeant Pepper before briefly grasping his grief and calling him a “liggabit.” Her cognition is too damaged for stable recognition, but she consistently responds to his presence with warmth and trust, suggesting that a deeper form of knowing survives her memory loss.

  5. Why does she give Hai $4,000 if she needs it for her own care?
    During a lucid-dementia episode, she casts Hai as Sergeant Pepper and insists they must flee to London. The money—saved by her husband Jonas—becomes a prop in this fantasy. But the gesture also reflects her profound trust in Hai. He later uses the money to help his cousin Sony, fulfilling the money’s true purpose: to enable love and survival, not escape.

For a deeper look at how Grazina’s story fits into the novel’s ending, read our ending explained. If you still have questions about her character or the plot, explore our questions and answers page.