The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Vuong, Ocean. “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” The Poetry Archive, https://poetryarchive.org/poem/someday-ill-love-ocean-vuong/.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Ocean Vuong was born in 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Though the Vietnam War had already ended more than a decade ago, its trauma had lasting consequences. During the Vietnam War, Vuong’s white American grandfather (enlisted in the U.S. Navy) married his maternal grandmother from the Vietnamese countryside. As a result of Saigon’s fall to communist forces, Vuong’s grandfather, who had gone back to visit home in the US, was not allowed to return to Vietnam and was, as a result, separated from Vuong’s grandmother. The sense of a fractured family was only heightened when Vuong’s grandmother separated his mother and her siblings in orphanages in an attempt to secure their survival. Later, the family was forced to abandon their birth country when a police officer became suspicious of Vuong’s mother’s mixed heritage, which would leave her vulnerable to the regime’s discriminatory labor policies.

Eventually, two-year-old Vuong and his family achieved asylum in the US. While Vuong was, much later, able to reunite with his maternal grandfather, the trauma of a fractured family continued to follow Vuong when his family settled down in Hartford, Connecticut soon after achieving asylum; Vuong’s father abandoned the family. This familial history is perhaps evident in Vuong’s frequent use of poetry and language to explore the theme of a family broken by the memory of war trauma that has been passed down through the generations. Vuong himself is also vocal about his attachment to femininity, specifically his mother. In fact, she, a manicurist, was the one who renamed Vuong “Ocean” after learning about the word in a conversation with one of her customers. She found the name fitting because it referred to massive bodies of water like the Pacific Ocean, which connects the United States to Vietnam.

Within this aforementioned context, like much of his other writing, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” explores themes of maternity, paternal abandonment, and healing from these generational traumas that are all related to the diaspora of family as a consequence of the Vietnam War. Also notable is how Ocean directly addresses the poem to himself (the first word of the first line of the poem is his name, “Ocean”), and his attempts to comfort and express care and love for himself in the face of suffering and trauma. He tells himself “Don’t worry” in lines 4 and 14 and “Don’t be afraid” in lines 1 and 26. Conventionally in poetry, the reader should be careful not to equate the poetic persona with the poet, even if the poet’s writing is in first-person. But the highly personal and confessional nature of Vuong’s poetry, including “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” in which he directly addresses himself with familiarity by his own first name, suggests that readers can equate the poem’s speaker with its author.

"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" is based on the poem "Katy" by Frank O'Hara, in which a young girl describes her inner imaginative life. Vuong pulls the line "Someday I'll love Frank O'Hara" from the poem and repurposes it for his own expression of searching for self-love.