Will Byrnes's Reviews > On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an 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…sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

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“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you.”

Take one beam of light. Direct it through a prism. It will separate into its component colors. Reading Ocean Vuong is a bit like this. He takes words, images, and concepts, beams them through his prismatic, gravitic artistry, and the result is a spreading rainbow, bending in several directions. It is a bit of a trip reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Go ahead, take the Vuong acid. This is a trip worth taking.


Ocean Vuong - image from The Guardian - credit Adrian Pope

On Earth… is not all straightforward story-telling, although there is plenty of that in here. It is a mix of elements.

The parts. The form. Little Dog is writing an extended letter to his mother, Rose, telling her of his experiences, a letter she will not, cannot ever read. He had tried teaching her to read English, but she gave up in short order, claiming that she had gotten that far being able to see, so did not really need it. Uncomfortable, too, with the dis-order of a child teaching a parent. The story of helping at the nail salon where she worked, where the workers inhale culture as well as toxic chemicals.

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. 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.

The History. Family. Little Dog tells of his grandmother, Lan, in Viet Nam, marrying a GI, bearing him a child, Little Dog’s mother. Being left behind when the USA fled. His history with his grandmother, their closeness, how she protected him as much as she could. When he was tasked with plucking the white hairs from her head, she would tell him stories.

As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open to them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

The story of his mother, growing up in Viet Nam, ostracized for being too white, her PTSD as an adult, and how that manifested as physical abuse of her son.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

The story of Little Dog’s contending with the dual challenges of being a yellow boy in a white place, (Hartford, Connecticut), in the poorer parts, and a gay one, to boot. Coming of age as a gay male teenager, first experiencing sex and a lasting relationship, until well, you’ll see.


Ocean Vuong aged two with his mother and aunt at Philippines refugee camp - image from 2017 Guardian interview

The story of his relationship with his American grandfather, and a secret in that bond.

He writes about Tiger Woods, offering some history of how he came by his name, and wonders why Woods is only very rarely referred to as half-Asian.

There is much consideration of language. In an interview with PBS, Vuong talked about how in Vietnamese culture, farm workers would sing as they worked, merging the action of their bodies with the rhythms of the songs and poems. Other elements contribute to his perspective. Vuong talks about his struggles in school.

Reading was particularly hard, and he suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, though he says now: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” - from The Rumpus

He writes of the body as a form of language.

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron…

And

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.
Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

The sadness of loss permeates. Little Dog has his own losses to grieve, his mother and grandmother far more. But there is recognition, also, that the trials of the past have allowed for some of the good things of the present. This is not a pity party.

Gruesomeness, having to do with macaques, is very far from gorgeous, but is fleeting, and can be seen as an image of the darkest sort of colonialism. There is also LOL humor in the occasional mismatch of cultures.

Vuong can start off a chapter writing about a table, for example, and turn that into a labyrinth, that winds, bends and turns, and somehow winds up back at the table. Very Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

This is one of the more quotable books you will read. A few:

Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.
or
the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
or
I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

You get the idea. And plenty more where those came from.

While this is a small book in size, it is neither a slight, nor an easy read. You do not have to be a poet, or a fan of poetry to appreciate the wonderfulness of this book, but it wouldn’t hurt. The stories Ocean Vuong tells are clear and very accessible, but the linguistic gymnastics can leave you needing to uncross your eyes, more than once. But gymnastics are stimulating too, and might loosen up some latent cranial muscles. We may or may not be gorgeous briefly, or at all, but this book is a work of surpassing beauty, and will remain so forever.

Review first posted – December 13, 2019

Publication dates
==========June 4, 2019 - hardcover
==========June 1, 2021 - Trade paperback



=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Tumblr and Instagram pages

Vuong is an award-winning poet. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.

Interviews
-----The Paris Review – June 5, 2019 - Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong - by Spencer Quong
-----The Guardian – June 9, 2019 - Ocean Vuong: ‘As a child I would ask: What’s napalm?’- by Emma Brockes
-----The Creative Independent – May 16, 2017 - Ocean Vuong on being generous in your work
-----LA Review of Books – Article is from June 2019, but the interview was done in 2017 - Failing Better: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong - by Viet Thanh Nguyen
-----The Guardian – October 3, 2017 - War baby: the amazing story of Ocean Vuong, former refugee and prize-winning poet - by Claire Armistead

Items of Interest
-----Excerpt – The New Yorker published this piece from Vuong on May 13, 2017. It is essentially an excerpt from the book. A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read
-----The Rumpus – a 2014 piece by Vuong - The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation
-----The Guardian - April 2, 2022 - Ocean Vuong: ‘I was addicted to everything you could crush into a white powder’ by Lisa Allardice - on his upcoming book, but with relevant intel on the author independent to that