On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous 

by Ocean Vuong

Paperback, 196 pages

This is the first novel of the contemporary American Poet Ocean Vuong which tells of a story of writer Little Dog through letters addressed to her mother who is illiterate. This may be a novel but it's fifty percent autobiographical. Some nonfictional portions are the fact that Vuong's mother worked as a manicurist and he also became a writer and that they are Vietnamese immigrants and lived in Hartford, Connecticut. He's also a queer.   

The story is told in an epistolary form but in a non-linear manner. It is about struggles of being a child of Vietnam war who immigrated to the US with his grandmother and mother, who grows up to be a queer, who had a relationship with an all-American boy who is an addict.      

The story may be about the coming-of-age of a Vietnamese immigrant in the US seeking to fit and thrive and survive in the land of milk and honey but in the end, it is also to find out that US has its own share of domestic war when it comes to drug overdoses and domestic violence tied with American masculinity.

This may be my second book reading a man-to-man sexual encounter (I am not yet done with the first book) but the fact that I finished this book is already a testament that this is worth a try. The rawness of the voice and experience of Little Dog in his letters addressed to her mother is heart stabbing. The lyrical eloquence of Ocean Vuong in expressing his relationship with his mother, then grandmother, then Paul and his first love Trevor, then the expected and unexpected deaths of some of these special persons in his life, make one stay on the pages.  

This book tackles how it is to become a part of a family that has survived war and then suffers poverty and illiteracy so that Little Dog, a third generation immigrant, shall become a literate American with a happy life but he is also a queer which makes him to suffer more and only to realize that being an American is not all happy too as seen in the life of his friends who died of drug overdose. 

His reference to animals from monarchs going south and never returning to veal who are slaughtered and marching family of cows toward the cliff, to works of other artists like Barthes, to a loose reference to Tiger Woods' life along the way are all so engaging.

The letters were written so personally and deeply to someone Little Dog wished to read but in fact they became too deep perhaps because he knows his mother won't be able to read it. Still, it is a love letter rooted in love hoped to be read by a mother, a family who cannot read. And so, it remains to be a love letter hopeful for love and acceptance.  

From this book that attempted to use words to bridge two generations of illiteracy to his own, here are the lines I highlighted:

Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?

What is a country but a life sentence?

To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

In other words, macaques employ memory in order to survive.

A girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest.

that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were God, you'd know that it's a flood.

Work somehow sutured a fracture inside me.

how deep a season opens when you refuse to follow the days out of it. 

Because the thing about beauty is that it's only beautiful outside of itself. 

I was a driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.

Destruction was necessary for art.

Why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

It's not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.

Too much joy is lost in our desperation to keep it. 

A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved. 

What have we become to each other if not what we've done to each other?

It was beauty that we risked ourselves for.

Reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost.

And like word, I hold no weight in this world yet still carry my own life.