Reading Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous felt like reading a poem, but it also felt like I was reading the secret diary of a young boy, dusty from the all the years that had passed between its writing and my happenstance discovery. In actuality, it is an epistolary novel in which Little Dog writes to his illiterate mother Rose, although his words may never reach her, at least in this lifetime:
“Dear Ma,
I am writing to reach you — even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.”
Vuong’s own background as a Vietnamese-American immigrant, his family history, and certain anecdotes that feel quotidian yet viscerally real all gave me the impression that this novel is, at least to some extent, autobiographical in nature. For example, Little Dog describes an episode from Rose’s job at the nail salon, in which a customer was crying about how her “little girl Julie” died from cancer. Rose consoles the lady, “my mom, too, she die from the cancer,” only to realize that… “Julie’s a fucking horse!”
This episode sounded like something that could have actually happened in Vuong’s childhood — his mother worked at the nail salon, just like Rose — and concisely captured the socioeconomic gap between immigrants like Rose and white people like the customer. The socioeconomic gap not only has materialistic consequences, but perhaps more importantly, emotional consequences, too, that unfortunately affect our sense of dignity. It was not difficult to instantly visualize the metaphorical hierarchy represented by the customer comfortably sitting down in a chair, getting her manicure/pedicure done, crying about her horse (of all animals. When I think of ‘rich white people animals,’ I think of horses) while Rose, kneeling down (a practical but subservient position, nonetheless), painted the customer’s nails and sympathized with her, only to realize she was talking about a fucking horse, not her daughter, as she had reasonably assumed.
“I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck — the pieces floating, finally legible.”
The quote above accurately captures the novel’s style and essence — it is fragmented, raw, and haunting. Rose, Little Dog’s mother, suffers from PTSD and is often physically abusive toward Little Dog — he even calls her a monster sometimes. Lan, Little Dog’s grandmother, suffers from schizophrenia, and eventually dies from stage four bone cancer. In a sense, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is also a book about intergenerational trauma.
“Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter.
In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name — Lan — in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping.
From that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son.
All this time I told myself we were born from war — but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence — but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
Did the violence fail to spoil the fruit, though? I think Little Dog is trying to convince himself here that the answer is no, but in my view, Lan’s schizophrenia, Rose’s PTSD and abusive outbursts, and Little Dog’s skewed perception of the role of violence and his repressed emotions tell me otherwise. Although there is some aspect of beauty to be found in the survival of Little Dog’s family and their newfound home in Hartford, CT, I can’t help but read this novel as a testament to the fact that intergenerational trauma is an inevitable corollary of war.
In addition to intergenerational trauma, this novel also intricately deals with themes like abuse, language (and its role in the immigrant experience), the importance of names, what it means to be American, and more. Below, I will list some of the quotes/moments that made me pause and re-read because of their profundity.
Quotes/Moments That Made Me Pause and Re-read:
- On a school field trip, a boy shoved Little Dog’s face into the glass window of the school bus. “He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.”
- Rose and Lan didn’t know the English word for oxtail, so they tried to use their body language to illustrate it to the grocery store worker, only to be laughed at. As they left the grocery store with bread and mayo instead, Little Dog promised himself: “I’d never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you.”
- “Sometimes, at night, the girl asleep, Lan stares into the dark, thinking of another world, one where a woman holds her daughter by the side of a road, a thumbnail moon hung in the clear air. A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.”
(Lan means ‘lily’ in Vietnamese)
- “A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones — with or without citizenship — aching, toxic, and underpaid.”
- “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
- “Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. ”
At times, the fragmented narrative — the shipwrecked pieces — lost me, and left me feeling confused or sometimes horrified at the brutal and raw portrayal of abuse and violence. At other times, Vuong’s poetic illustration of Little Dog’s family history and his own bildungsroman made me pause to soak in the beauty of his words. Anyhow, I’ve never read anything like this, both in terms of style and content.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is about all the themes I mentioned above, but it is also largely about grief. Little Dog lost his innocence (from the intergenerational trauma that had wilted Lan and Rose’s souls), his first love Trevor (I can’t confidently label their relationship as love, but I think Little Dog would consider Trevor to be his first love) to his drug addiction, and his grandmother Lan to cancer.
Just from reading the first page, I could tell that Vuong is a literary genius. The fact that this novel is essentially a letter that will never be read by its intended recipient is such a heart-wrenchingly accurate depiction of Little Dog’s relationship with Rose, and a brilliant stylistic choice, as it allows Little Dog to grieve freely and in the best way he knows how.
