Book 741: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong

I have no idea where this book came from. I was 100% certain it was a recommendation by Kat Chow on the NPR podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, but I can’t find a reference to it anywhere. I did, however, find this wonderful story (profile?) in The Atlantic written by Kat about spending an afternoon with Vuong, who happened to be a few years ahead of her in high school.

No matter where it came from I’ve been trailing this book from the BPL for months. I was on hold for a long time and then it finally came available at the same time they offered the ability to delay claiming the book, so I delayed for weeks. I knew I needed to be in the right mindset to read it, but I couldn’t remember why. Well, I finally felt ready to read it and I’m SO glad I waited.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is another one of those books that punches you in the gut, but you really won’t feel it for years to come until all of a sudden, you’ll be thinking about it and have no clue why. In a way it’s similar to We Contain Multitudes that I read earlier in quarantine, but for me I think it goes up a level to somewhere around At Swim, Two Boys and Never Let Me Go. This is a bit odd because it’s more similar to Multitudes in the finite timeline, but the language and it’s longer impact on me is more of the latter.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly. (175)

I keep going back to this comment in Roxane Gay’s review on Goodreads (someone I follow linked to it):

That said, I just didn’t fall in love with this book. The prose was, perhaps, too beautiful, too resonant, without enough story behind it. That is a personal preference, the desire for story. As I got deeper into the novel, I kept wanting a clearer sense of where the story was going, I wanted to feel like there was more substance to hold all that style. I do still recommend this novel because I’ve never read anything like it.

And I can’t help but disagree with it. For me Vuong’s novel didn’t necessarily need a cohesive story line. To me, it was like standing outside someone’s house looking through a window, but the action isn’t taking place right there it’s actually taking place in the room on the other side of the door so you’re only getting the briefest glimpse and taste of what’s going on. It’s not a full picture and it’s never going to be a complete picture and you’re still one step removed.

That being said, Gay did mention the beautiful language and I may as well have highlighted the entire book. Vuong’s writing is an excellent example of what a poet can do when they put their mind to prose. These are just three quotes that I played with in my mind as I read them and then read them out loud to hear the flow and the rhythm:

As Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger. (5)

What happened was that I was a boy once and bruiseless. I was eight when I stood in the one-bedroom apartment in Hartford staring at Grandma Lan’s sleeping face. Despite being your mother, she is nothing like you; her skin three shades darker, the color of dirt after a rainstorm, spread over a skeletal face whose eyes shone like chipped glass. (15)

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. 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? (139)

The second and third quote broke something inside of me. To describe something as bruiseless, to make the default bruised and then the chipped glass, everything was just broken, but not downtrodden. And that third quote the comma, the fetus, the continuation of life, the continuation of a sentence, who makes that connection? I hold my breath every time I re-read that sentence, because it strikes me with such awe and somehow ferocity at the same time.

In my Hartford, where fathers were phantoms, dipping in and out of their children’s lives, like my own father. Where grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and bà ngoạis were kings, crowned with nothing but salvaged and improvised pride and the stubborn testament of their tongues as they waited on creaking knees and bloated feet outside Social Services for heat and oil assistance smelling of drugstore perfume and peppermint hard candies, their brown oversized Goodwill coats dusted with fresh snow as they huddled, steaming down the winter block—their sons and daughters at work or in jail or overdosed or just gone, hitching cross-country on Greyhounds with dreams of kicking the habit, starting anew, but then ghosting into family legends. (213)

Apart from the beauty of the novel, Vuong’s writing of the immigrant experience was eye opening and fascinating. Being torn between two countries and cultures (one he barely knows) and coping with the limitations of his mother’s education shone a light on first generation immigrant children. When you add in the twist that the protagonist, Little Dog, is also coming to terms with his sexuality, there’s is so much to take in from these brief glances from toxic masculinity and racism to Americanism and anti-immigrant feeling.

“Hey.” The jowlboy leaned in, his vinegar mouth on the side of my cheek. “Don’t you ever say nothin’? Don’t you speak English?” He grabbed my shoulder and spun me to face him. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers. (24)

One does not ‘pass’ in America, it seems, without English. (52)

The large boy took out a key chain and started scraping the paint off my bike. It came off so easily, in rosy sparks. I sat there, watching the concrete fleck with bits of pink as he gashed the key against the bike’s bones. I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.

That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity. (134)

That bolded line in the second quote was yet another line that made it feel like something tore inside of me. I can just put myself into a small child’s shoes and feel the pain and terror and then the confusion on top of it and just not knowing how to respond even with the most basic of emotions. The navigation of so many identities was crucial to this work and yet didn’t overwhelm the work.

And then about halfway through the book I questioned everything about the book and the author. I really wanted to know whether or not he was just taking the piss writing all these grandiose things with beautiful prose through the most minute actions and situations. You know basically was he just pumping out shit, and then I remembered this line from earlier in the book where he had Trevor, the protagonist’s best friend/first love say this somewhat cliché philosophical line,

“‘Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain’t that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.” He gestured to indicate the whole town, even though we were the only people there far as the eye could see. “No wonder people used to think it was god himself.” (99)

And I knew that at the very least there was a minimum of conscious effort to differentiate the characters and philosophies and everything about Little Dog’s observations was true to the character at least.

Vuong’s use of the opioid epidemic in the story was well done and crafted. The way it has destroyed small (often rural) town life and has created a generation of loss in only the way a war (or health pandemic as we’re learning) can do was interesting. The vibrancy with which he described the drugs being used and the casual introduction of them fascinated me. And then there was a sardonic air as the book moved towards its ending:

They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.” (181)

The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones. (183)

Not only does he critique the USA and the system that brought about this new pandemic, but he does it in such a way that is incredibly harsh and yet stunningly beautiful, that line about American sadness, oof.

And, finally what I took away from the work was the sense of beauty and its fleetingness. Not only from the title and the realization of who Little Dog and his mom are, but also of how fake the most precious things can come across whether they are or not. At base this is a book about authenticity and sincerity.

Now, whenever I visit a museum, I’m hesitant to come too close to a painting for fear of what I might, or might not, find there. Like the pinkish smear of Trevor’s dollar-store peaches, I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room’s threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed. (115)

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. (231)

Where this really came home for me was in Part III of the novel when Little Dog asks his mother in the letter to walk with him from the train station to their house and he relives moments from his entire childhood and her life. It’s when everything in the novel comes together and even though it’s still only snippets it’s that looking back on his short life so far but sharing the overwhelming burden of beauty born out of tragedy, and not tragedy born out of beauty. I blazed through the final part of the novel from the desperate need to read more of the beautiful language.

Recommendation: This is a beautiful book. There were so many times that I would read a passage and it felt like something tore or broke inside of me. Vuong’s ability to play with language and write luxuriously harsh passages that pull you between sobbing silently and wanting to scream as loud as possible is astounding. I could’ve highlighted 95% of the book because of the elegance of his wordplay. I found myself on numerous occasions reading passages out loud because I needed to feel the undulation of the words in my mouth and the melody of the words as they reached my ears. Many people have critiqued the work for lack of story, but for me there was never supposed to be a story, it was only ever going to be the briefest glance of something so beautiful that you could never grasp what it truly was in the first place.

Opening Line: “Let me begin again.”

Closing Line: “Then, for no reason, you start to laugh.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.” (4)

“The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?” (8)

“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, ‘Look.'” (12)

“To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.” (13)

“To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.” (18)

“As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.” (31)

“While doing research, I read an article from an 1884 El Paso Daily Times, which reported that a white railroad worker was on trial for the murder of an unnamed Chinese man. The case was ultimately dismissed. The judge, Roy Bean, cited that Texas law, while prohibiting the murder of human beings, defined a human only as White, African American, or Mexican. The nameless yellow body was not considered human because it did not fit in a slot on a piece of paper. Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.” (62)

“But the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me. A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again. A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations. I made out people, verbs, abstractions, ideas with my fingers, my arms, and by drawing in the dirt.” (90)

“What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place. The way he watched me back there in the field, when we worked briefly, side by side, our arms brushing against each other as the plants racked themselves in a green blur before me, his eyes lingering, then flitting away when I caught them. I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe, who, in elementary school, was sent to the fifteen-minute time-out in the corner only to be found two hours later, when everyone was long gone and Mrs. Harding, eating lunch at her desk, peered over her macaroni salad and gasped. ‘My god! My god, I forgot you were still here! What are you still doing here?'” (96)’

“Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.” (107)

“Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.” (138)

“Once, at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ’Nam Vet 4 Life, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. ‘No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.’ I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it.

But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. ‘Good for you, man,’ a man once said to me at a party, ‘you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.'” (178)

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you.” (186)

“A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.” (215)

“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 . . . To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.” (2388