Ocean Vuong (born Vinh Quoc Vuong) is a Vietnamese-American poet and novelist, born on a farm outside Saigon in 1988.
His maternal grandfather was an American soldier in Vietnam, and his grandmother was—as relayed in the poem "Notebook Fragments"—a local "Vietnamese farmgirl." When Saigon fell in 1975, however, his grandfather was in the United States visiting family, and his grandmother feared that she and her children would be targeted as collaborators. As a result, she separated her three children—Ocean's mother among them—and placed them in separate orphanages so that they would not be evacuated from Vietnam or exploited by dissidents looking to leave the country with "family."...
