Referring to the moment with his father, Vuong says “he was singing, which is why I remember it” (3).

Vuong is looking through that which has locked him out of this moment – cueing the reader into what he will do in this section on a metonymic level, then, the key illustrates Vuong’s attempts to try and understand the past that he has been barred from previously. In this moment, He is unable to fully see everything because looking through the keyhole is only a partial view of the situation. The poem depicts a moment where he “watched, through the keyhole” his father playing guitar and singing (3). By titling the poem this, Vuong foreshadows the rest of section where he attempts to transgress a threshold to understanding the past. The first poem of the collection is entitled “Threshold,” which implies a certain liminality – a space of transition and transformation. Therefore, Vuong does not have access to stories about immigration, so the majority of the first section of the book is an imaginative trope to construct a story for himself. His parents respond to his questions about the past with an unwillingness to talk, largely in part because of all the sacrifices his parents made in order to provide a secure future so Vuong might never have to think about these struggles. In his renowned book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong explores the ways in which his experience as an immigrant affect his sense of identity although he was not alive for the Vietnamese War, Vuong examines in the first section of his book how the emotional trauma of the war works transgenerationally and continues to affect his identity in the present day by forcing him into a perpetual transitional state.īecause his parents refuse to talk about the war, there is a generational disconnect which further dissociates Vuong from the past. Poet Ocean Vuong immigrated from Vietnam to America at the age of 2, and has spent the majority of his life in the states. Because of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, a proxy war to the Cold War, a wave of Vietnamese refugees immigrated to the United States in an attempt to flee the political instability of Vietnam.

Night with exit wounds