Ocean Vuong’s hauntingly beautiful first novel has been praised by critics as a painful yet extraordinary portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. It was an instant New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, and shortlisted for the 2019 Centre for Fiction First Novel Prize. The accolades that this book is a masterpiece and work of genius is well deserved, Vuong’s lyrical and shockingly intimate writing unveils a fractured narrative of a family torn between disparate cultures and it is not so much briefly gorgeous but permanently stunning.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a young Vietnamese son (Little Dog) to his illiterate mother which unearths a family history rooted in Vietnam and featuring a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Little Dog’s narration is elliptical and poetic — a sharp juxtaposition to the processing and articulation of difficult memories, fractured by his mother’s PTSD and grandmother’s schizophrenia. He writes:
Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war
His recollections about his childhood in Hartford, Connecticut in the 1990s is punctured by the realization that ‘colour was one of the first things we knew of yet knew nothing about’. Ma forced Little Dog to gulp down gallons of milk, perhaps in hope of a growth spurt but in actuality —
Both of us [were] hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy
Vuong writes that he was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it. His fraught relationship with his mentally-ill, violent-loving mother and crazy-wise grandmother is one of the core elements of the book. The originality and beauty of his writing are admirable, as Vuong reflects on his mother “By writing, I mar it, I change, embellish and preserve you all at once.”
The immigrant labour experience is exemplified in Vuong’s reflections about work — both his mother’s job at the nail salon and later Little Dog’s experiences working in the tobacco fields. The resigned camaraderie and irony of his mother’s thankless job are punctured by the paradoxical smells of “cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mint and cardamom” from cooking in the back room that mingles with the toxic “formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-sol and bleach” which damages the workers’ health and hands. Children of immigrants are often told to overcome their inferiority complex and hold their head high despite being from a “lower” caste, however, Vuong recognises the power in the word “sorry”, writing —
The most common English word spoken in the nail salon was “sorry”. In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one has to pander until the word itself becomes currency.
Being sorry pays. Being sorry even, or especially, when one has no-fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.
As Little Dog ventures into labour at the tobacco fields, he notes that “sorry” is a passport to remain for the Hispanic labourers, the physical exertion is written with excruciating detail — “you could hear their lungs working as they cut, the stalks falling in bright green splashes around their hunched backs.” It is also at the tobacco fields that Little Dog meets Trevor — “the boy whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work — want.” Vuong’s coming of age and coming-out experience is not romanticized but written with such frankness and precision that the reader is drawn into the palpable, painful desire that leads to obliteration.
Trevor, the farmer’s grandson, is white but hardly privileged — addicted to painkillers and fueled by drug-induced hatred. Little Dog realizes that he can only take Trevor’s hatred head-on —
What do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again, each time entering the same room
Vuong’s perspective on love is diluted by his lived experiences with his fractured family, this is embodied in his belief “To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration” and sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined. The relationship with Trevor allows Little Dog to learn that “sex can get you close to a boy, but language gets you deeper”, perhaps the power of love lies in its power of destruction —
They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.
Little Dog’s relationship with his schizophrenic grandmother Lan is another highlight of this book, he writes that “trauma affects not only the brain but the body to, its musculature, joints, and posture.” His grandmother tells him that he is called Little Dog because -
To love something.. is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched — and alive
Lan’s life was marred by the Vietnam War and being rejected by her family after leaving an arranged marriage at 17, becoming a sex worker for American GIs left Lan with invisible scars that will never heal. Little Dog’s unsparing description of Lan’s death is poetic in its lyrical lamenting but also provides an explicit commentary on death —
We try to preserve life — even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body
The final section of the book is a euphoric culmination of Vuong’s insights on beauty, survival and freedom. America’s systemic repression of immigrants is addressed gracefully, with Vuong’s admonishment that “they will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.”
The rumination on freedom is perhaps one of the most emphatic and memorable passages of the book, Vuong writes —
All freedom is relative, and sometimes, it’s not freedom at all but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance still there. But I took it anyway, that widening, because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough.
Ultimately, the fragmented narrative exposes Vuong’s transformative experiences and harrowing understanding of surviving the aftermath of trauma. Towards the end of the book, he insists that his family are not born from war but from beauty “Let no one mistake us for the fruits of violence — but rather, that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.” The strength and self-determination is necessary within a temporary life as Vuong concludes —
If, relative to the history of our planet, individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say. Then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.
There is nothing obvious about the beauty of Vuong’s debut novel but it is a beauty that asserts itself against tragedy, trauma, abandonment and violence. Vuong asks the reader to focus on the value of life in the midst of struggle as on earth, we’re only briefly gorgeous but this book will leave a permanent impression.
