Memory and Historical Erasure: The Burden of Forgetting in Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness
The Thematic Claim
In The Emperor of Gladness, memory is not a stable archive but a contested, fragile, and often involuntary process of erasure and distortion. The novel argues that both personal and collective histories are routinely forgotten, suppressed, or sanitized—yet these very acts of erasure also create gaps where unexpected connection, imaginative survival, and provisional grace can emerge. The characters move through a world where historical trauma (the Vietnam War, the Civil War, colonial displacement) is pushed to the margins, while intimate losses (Noah’s death, Grazina’s fading mind) are held in fragile rituals. Through Grazina Vitkus’s dementia, the town of East Gladness’s selective memory, and the distorted representations of war in film and museum tours, Vuong traces how erasure shapes identity, belonging, and the possibility of care.
The Town That Forgets Itself: Collective Erasure in East Gladness
Chapter 1 establishes East Gladness as a place that actively rewrites its own history. The narrator, a collective “we,” describes the town with lyrical affection, but the details reveal a landscape saturated with lost stories. Tony Millsap, a limbless war hero, has a town renamed after him—yet the narrator admits most residents refused to call themselves “East Millsap” out of pride. The boy Adam Munsey, crushed by a school bus, is remembered only in the height of a Lego T-Rex statue. The founding mayor’s Victorian is now a halfway house. The Colt factory, once an arms manufacturer selling to both sides of the Civil War, is now a Coca-Cola plant. The graffiti on King Philip’s Bridge includes “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal” and “Guerra a los ricos,” but the bridge’s original name—honoring a Wampanoag chief who fought to reclaim land—has been largely forgotten.
The town’s beauty is inseparable from this erasure. The narrator insists “it is beautiful here, which is why the ghosts never leave.” But the ghosts are precisely the erased: the runaway slaves whose armory became a library, the war dead, the teenagers who become parents in the Walmart parking lot. The novel suggests that forgetting is a condition of survival for a declining New England town, but it also costs the town its capacity to fully mourn. The suicide attempt of Hai on that bridge is both an act of despair and a bid to belong to a place that has already forgotten so many.
Grazina’s Dementia: Personal Erasure and Reimagination
Grazina Vitkus’s dementia is the most intimate portrayal of memory loss in the novel. Her mind does not simply empty; it reconfigures the past into a survival narrative. When Hai first meets her, she renames him “Labas” (Lithuanian for “hello”), overwriting his identity with a word that signals new possibility. Her ritual of crushing dinner rolls in the backyard is a self-made magic spell to dispel sorrow—an act that bypasses verbal memory altogether, relying on physical gesture.
Later, when social services come to take her away, Grazina reenacts World War II resistance. She calls Hai “Sergeant Pepper” and throws salt and sugar at Lucas and the counselor, shouting about Nazis and camps. This is not merely confusion; it is a reappropriation of traumatic history. Grazina’s family fled the Soviet occupation of Lithuania; her cousin was killed in raids. In her dementia, the past is not lost but relived—and reshaped. She tells Hai, “I’m not crazy, I promise. I was making it all up, okay? It’s just a game.” The line blurs between genuine memory loss and a willful performance of madness as a strategy of resistance.
Yet her erasure also causes profound grief. In Chapter 24, she asks Hai, “But am I still me if I don’t remember who I was?” The question echoes the novel’s central anxiety. Grazina’s identity becomes a series of fragments: the owl collection, the Easter dinner tape, the husband’s gallstones preserved in a jar. These objects hold memory more reliably than her mind. When Hai gives her a porcelain owl to hold, she calms—but the objects themselves are also decaying, like the VHS tape that skips and warps.
Sanitized History: The Museum and the Movie
The novel sharply critiques how institutional memory erases uncomfortable truths. In Chapter 20, Hai and Sony watch Gettysburg and discuss the Stonewall Jackson house tour. The tour never mentions that the house was bought by the Daughters of the Confederacy or that Jackson owned slaves (Albert, Amy, Emma, Hetty, and her sons Cyrus and George). Instead, the house presents a sanitized domestic scene—a knife on a cutting board, a sprig of green onion—while the enslaved people remain “everywhere yet nowhere to be found.”
This selective visibility parallels the representation of Vietnamese deaths in The Green Berets, which Hai watches as a child with Sony. White actors in yellowface play Vietnamese corpses, shot in long shot so their faces blur. The novel asks: “What does it do to your mind to see ‘your people’ die so vastly that you can’t even tell that they are not, in fact, your people at all?” The erasure is double: the actual Vietnamese dead are replaced by white actors, and the audience is trained to see only “death itself,” not individual lives.
Sony’s identification with the Confederate soldiers in Gettysburg is therefore complex. Their faces are clear, their deaths pathos-filled. Sony, a Black man, searches for himself in the film—a search that the sanitized museum tour forecloses. The novel suggests that historical erasure is not just about what is forgotten but about who gets to be seen as fully human.
The Complexity of Erasure: Grace in the Gaps
Memory and erasure in the novel are not simply binary opposites. Forgetting can be a form of survival. Hai wears Noah’s UPS jacket, a garment that holds the memory of his dead friend but also obscures his own identity. Maureen insists that everything is “corn cake”—a redefinition that erases distinctions but also offers acceptance. The corn bread itself, crushed into mud, becomes a ritual for sorrow.
Grazina’s dementia, while devastating, allows her to reimagine herself as a partisan fighter. Her owl collection—with American owls having “more open faces,” Romanian ones having “skeptical” eyes—reflects national stereotypes, but owls are also symbols of wisdom and memory. The collection is both an archive of her past self and a crumbling one.
The salamander migration at the end of the novel offers an image of persistence despite erasure. Salamanders cross a parking lot in mass, “brave” in Hai’s eyes, even though many will die. Their brief, visible passage contradicts the town’s long forgetting. Hai kisses Grazina’s forehead as they listen; the moment of wonder does not reverse erasure but exists alongside it.
Ultimately, the novel refuses to present memory as something that can be fully recovered. Hai never learns his family’s full story—Uncle Minh was a laundry worker killed by an American grenade snag, not a soldier. The lost diamond at Devil’s Leap is never found. But the characters find ways to “drift” (the novel’s final word) within erasure, holding fragments of care: Sony’s scratch-off ticket, Maureen’s singing, Grazina’s whispered Lithuanian.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the town’s description in Chapter 1 establish the theme of historical erasure? The narrator presents East Gladness with affection while cataloguing sites where tragedy has been overwritten: the bus stop where Adam Munsey died, the Colt factory turned soda plant, the armory turned library. The town’s beauty depends on glossing over its violent past, suggesting that forgetting is built into the landscape.
2. Why does Grazina reenact World War II resistance when Lucas tries to take her away? Her dementia collapses past and present: she experienced Soviet occupation as a child, so the threat of institutional removal triggers a defense script. The performance allows her to assert agency and protects Hai by casting him as “Sergeant Pepper.” It shows how erased trauma can resurface in disguised forms.
3. What is the significance of the Stonewall Jackson house tour in Chapter 20? The tour erases the enslaved people who maintained the house, presenting only the general’s life. This mirrors how The Green Berets erases actual Vietnamese people. Both examples show that sanctioned history sanitizes violence and denies personhood to the erased group.
4. How does the UPS jacket function as a symbol of memory and erasure? The jacket belonged to Noah, Hai’s dead friend. Hai wears it as a relic of loss, but the jacket also obscures who Hai is—initially leading Grazina to mistake him for a delivery worker. It holds Noah’s memory while allowing Hai to drift into a new identity, embodying both preservation and displacement.
5. Does the novel suggest that erasure is entirely negative? Provide evidence. No. Grazina’s forgetting allows her to experience moments of joy and resistance. Hai’s inability to remember his theory about Pickett’s Charge opens space for Sony’s rhetoric of war. The salamander migration, brief and unrecorded, offers wonder. Erasure can create room for improvisation and grace, even as it mourns what is lost.