“When I was little, far back as I can remember,” Sony said, his voice eerily distant. “I used to have this dream, you know. I dreamt I was flying over East Gladness. It’s always at night and I can see the little streetlights flickering between the leaves and I’m flying but I don’t hear any wind. Sometimes the dream starts with me high up in the sky. Sometimes I’m on my way up, sometimes I’m coming down. Sometimes I’m over the water tower or the power plants or the big Walmart off Route 7. And for some reason I know—you know how you know things in dreams without nobody telling you?” “Yeah.” Hai turned to look at his cousin. “Well for some reason I knew that the people inside every house in East Gladness, and even beyond that, all across the county, were really penguins. Birds with wings that don’t work. Their rubbery feet shuffling through the little rooms below. And I would just keep soaring. And the thing is, in the dream I can never tell if I’m also a penguin or not. And every time I try to put my hands out in front of me I don’t…I don’t see nothing. But I must be something else since I’m flying and all, and penguins, their wings don’t work. I just can’t tell if, according Darwinian evolution, if the penguins ever flew, whether their wings worked once before, long ago, or were they, like, a hundred years away from working. I wonder if I’m just floating up there alone, the only penguin with wings. And I don’t know if I’m ahead of everybody or behind them. You know what I mean?”

— Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, James Aaron Oh (Narrator)