On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Such a gorgeous title and book cover for a novel. The protagonist, twenty-eight years old, writes to his mother who cannot read. He is nicknamed Little Dog. In his letter, he tells of his family’s history that began before he was born. It is about the damaging impact of the Vietnam war, how his family has to struggle to forge a new future. And it also tells of his life that his mother has never known. From the narration in the first person’s voice, we know that the protagonist who is now a writer, was brought up by his mother who suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. His mother, Rose has left her abusive husband to begin life in Hartford, Connecticut. She works at a nail salon.Little Dog’s grandmother, Lan also lives with them. Lan escapes an arranged marriage and marries an American soldier when she is expecting Rose.
Little Dog is empathetic of his mother’s sufferings though she behaves like a monster when she gets violent. He reads that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. ‘Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.’When he is ten years old, he tries to run away from home. Lan looks for him and tells him that his mother loves him but she is sick in the brains. He learns that he’s called Little Dog because “To love something … is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched — and alive.” When he is thirteen, he stops his mother from hitting him.
Vuong’s prose is beautiful.
‘Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would sasy it. But if you were a god you would see them. You would look down at this grove of pines, the fresh tips flared lucent at each treetop, tender- damp in their late autumn flush. You would look past the branches, past the rusted light splintered through the brambles, the needles falling, one by one, as you lay your god eyes son them . You’d trace the needles as they hurled hemselves past the lowest bough, toward the cooling forest floor, to land on the two boys lying side by side ,the blood already dry on their cheeks.’
When he is working at a tobacco farm, he meets Trevor who is older. Trevor is addicted to prescriptive drug . When he finds out that Trevor has passed, he is in a class. Trevor dies at twenty-two due to ‘an overdose from heroin laced with fentanyl‘.
In his voice,
‘I did not tell anyone I was coming. I was in the Italian American Lit class at a city college in Brooklyn when I saw, on my phone, a Facebook update from Trevor’s account, posted by his old man.Trevor had passed away the night before. I am broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only through I could keep, sitting in my seat,how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.’
The writer also writes :
‘ I know. It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.‘
He hears Trevor’s voice. You should stay. Little Dog is going to a college in New York. They meet to say goodbye. They go to a diner for waffles. In his voice,’I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him’.
The protagonist and his family live with the memory of the war.The present is always intertwined with the past. ‘Whether we want to or not, we are travelling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.’
Ocean Vuong‘s debut is autobiographical. It is a moving story about familial love, identity, desires and impermanence. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is not a read you can devour in one sitting as its prose is melancholic and poignant. I read it in small doses. The book title reminds me of the song ‘Dust in the Wind’ by Kansas.
