What do you do if the person you are living with moves imperceptibly from this ‘now’ you are living together to a ‘past now’ that you know nothing about? You are both sitting side by side, on the park bench, looking at the squirrels scuttling from tree to tree and, suddenly, you have no idea what your companion is talking about. Something other has crept into the conversation. Someone other. Unknown images are being described. Another place. Unfamiliar names.
What do you do?
Such situations are sensitively described by the author Ocean Vuong in his novel The Emperor of Gladness. His young character Hai is lodging with an elderly lady called Grazina. Hai knows nothing of Grazina. He becomes slowly acquainted with her past life as she relives painful experiences over and over as if she were in them at the very moment of their shared ‘now’.
Grazina is a Lithuanian refugee from the Second World War. Without any warning, a noise or a word voiced by another person or a movement by an animal would transport Grazina to her younger days. More often than not, these ventures into her teenage life took her to the days when she searched wildly for her brother under Nazi bombardment.
At first panicked by these unexpected wild meanderings, Hai learns to listen to his own instinct and go with the moment. The celebration fireworks in the town thundering over Grazina’s house transport Grazina to the moment she was shouting ‘My brother, Kristof’ at some duty sergeant. Hai wraps his arms around her waist like a safety seat belt and …
… a wild thought came to him. If she was that deep in the past, maybe he could reach her by going back there himself….With scenes from Slaughterhouse-Five fresh in his mind, the soldiers, the ruined German landscape, he took a breath and made his voice deep and manly, rooting it in his gut. “Ma’am”, he said, pausing to examine its authenticity. “Ma’am, don’t you worry now. We’re gonna go get your brother”’. [1]
Ocean Wong demonstrates amazing instinctive mastery in the development of a situation with which he may or may not be familiar with. Though the novel sounds biographical (the character Hai mentions having had similar experiences with his schizophrenic grandmother). For some pages he takes the reader step by step on how to take a mind reliving (to him) but living (for her) a frightening war-time bombing in the plains of war-torn Europe to the living room of suburban America more than half-a-century down the line. He skilfully uses Grazina’s home environment to navigate her mind and her body from those horrific German bombs to the peace of her American home. In her bathtub that became the jeep in which they would be escaping, Grazina gradually calmed her breathing. She is wearing an amber bracelet. The clanking noise that it makes against the porcelain of the bathtub takes her to another place:
‘”I used to swim in Lake Rékyva as a girl. With my brother”. Another clank. “But that’s all over. The water was bombed. The fish floated up, all fried and orange, rotting. Horrible. Terrible.”
“They bombed a lake?”
“What, you think I’m making this up? The Nazis would bomb anything, even water.” Clank.
This stirred something in him, and he realized now how odd it was that despite her derangement, she’d managed to enter such a clear, lucid state of linearity as the one they were in now. But then again, he knew nothing about dementia, what wide, unbroken vistas it might hold’. [2]
A beautifully written novel about surviving in America as the son of a war-time refugee from Vietnam, the author gives us a master class on, possibly, unintended consequences of his creativity: sharing a dignified and respectful life with a person living with ‘dementia’.
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[1]The Emperor of Gladness (published by Jonathan Cape, London, in 2025) Page 103 of the novel
[2] Page 107-108