Author Ocean Vuong answered the phone and the last person he expected to be on the other end of the line was Oprah Winfrey.
Winfrey chose Vuong’s latest book, “The Emperor of Gladness,” to be the 114th pick for her book club, and she filmed the moment she called him to tell him the news.
“Is this Ocean?” Winfrey asked in a video posted on TikTok on May 14.
“Yes, Anne?” Vuong replied, to which Winfrey said, “No, this is not Anne. This is Oprah. How are ya?”
Vuong, completely surprised, asked, “What?”
“This is Oprah Winfrey! How are you?” she responded.
Vuong was shocked into absolute silence for several seconds, leading Oprah to say, “Hello?”
The footage then cuts to Vuong saying, “Oh my God, are you kidding?”
Oprah replied, “No, I’m not kidding you one bit. I’m calling you because, Ocean, I love ‘The Emperor of Gladness’ so much, and I am so excited to choose it for the Oprah’s Book Club!”
Vuong couldn’t believe it, and then shared why the selection was such an honor to him personally.
“You don’t understand how much this means to me,” Vuong said. “Your voice was on the background of my entire childhood.”
Vuong shared that he helped answer the phone at his mother’s nail salon as a child, and that Winfrey’s show would frequently be playing on the TV.
“Your voice and your show is the only thing that she values,” Vuong said.
Vuong’s mother died in 2019. He told Winfrey what his mother would have thought about her choice for her book club.
“Pulitzer, Nobel, all that be damned, but if she was alive today…” he said, before Winfrey replied and said that it meant to much to her to hear that.
“I’m so proud that you recognized the love and humanity in the book because that’s the love and humanity your career and your show has given us,” Vuong said. “You give so many people hope and your voice is literally in our consciousness as we work and try to strive together a life.”
Vuong, the author of bestselling novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” shared more about Winfrey’s impact on his life in an interview on CBS Mornings on May 13.
“It’s such an honor to have her pick the book, because, you know, where I come from, working class people, the act of reading can be very intimidating,” he said. “Most of the clients in my mother’s nail salon were working women, single mothers who didn’t have second degrees, who only have high school educations.”
“And when I watched them, when they saw her book club show, they get up from the chair with a different posture,” he added.
Vuong said he would watch them get up and say, “I’m going to walk across this strip mall, I’m going to go to Barnes and Noble and get that book.”
“She made the act of reading accessible, and I watched these women feel so empowered, and I think it opened up the possibility of reading for them in ways that they never would have gotten,” he said. “And as a little boy, I didn’t know I was going to be a writer, but I think I saw that first.”
“I said, ‘I don’t know what that is — books — but they can change the posture of somebody’s mother so that they can stand a little taller and walk across and get a book with that kind of confidence,’ because she gave them a ticket into the discourse,” he continued. “And that access means so much to me, especially as a first generation immigrant, as a first generation (person) to go to college, as an educator, it does the world.”
