Care, Precarity, and Chosen Kinship: Reimagining Family in Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness 2025

This research paper examines how Ocean Vuong’s novel The Emperor of Gladness (2025) reconstructs the concept of family through the interwoven experiences of care, precarity, and chosen kinship. The study goes beyond the conventional biological epistemologies and sees elective affinities as an important survival mechanism for the outsider of the mainstream dealing with an insecure world. The analysis is centred on the concept of care as an intentional ethical practice, not just an emotion. The paper maps the ways in which characters experience a constant state of social and economic insecurity, and develop their own sphere of belonging. Such fragile and yet resilient relationships that are created through vulnerability, make care a public, political act. In addition, the research explores the novel's depiction of the relationship of chosen kinship as a refuge and space of mutual responsibility. Whereas the family configurations that are usually linked to trauma are inherited, the self-made family communities are a potent imagining of intimacy and support. Moreover, Vuong's style of writing, a gentle, disjointed prose, mirrors the frailty which he celebrates. In conclusion, this paper argues that, rather than being an inherited relation with blood, kinship becomes a practice that is constantly enacted and carefully tended to in the performance of The Emperor of Gladness. It ends by arguing that the novel suggests radical care and intentional community as the most relevant and promising answers to a precarious life and thus as a possible redefinition of belonging.