A LETTER TO MOTHER: “ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS” BY OCEAN VUONG PDF Free Download
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Journal of Romanian Literary Studies. Issue no. 20/2020
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A LETTER TO MOTHER: “ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS” BY
OCEAN VUONG
Anca Badulescu
Senior Lecturer PhD., Transilvania University of Brașov
Abstract: Ocean Vuong’s novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, written in the form of a letter to
the protagonist’s mother, is a Bildungsroman, a confession and self-analysis. It deals with war and
trauma, with violence and immigration, with queerness and loneliness. Nevertheless, this surprising
prose work is at the same time an experiment with poetical language. This article aims at highlighting
Vuong’s mastery in structuring his novel and using words in a unique way.
Keywords: color, smell, sound, Vietnam, gay
The novel starts in a very unusual way: “Let me begin again.” These are the first
words and they are followed by “Dear Ma”. The reader will suppose that this is going to be
the author’s letter to his mother, presumably re-written, maybe several times. Then Ocean
Vuong reveals the fact that his mother is illiterate. The question arises: why write the letter?
The answer comes on the second page: “I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am
told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.” (Vuong 2019, 4)
Soon enough the reader realizes that “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is not just a
letter addressed to the narrator’s mom, who will not read it, but a Bildungsroman, a painful,
at times violent introspection, which cuts deeply into the most intimate recesses of the
protagonist’s personality.
The epistle was written when Little Dog, as he was named in keeping with a
Vietnamese tradition according to which a name was supposed to keep the evil spirits away
from the name holder, was in his late twenties and already a writer. Little Dog’s story, though,
reaches far into the past long before he was born. The core of the narrative is rooted in
Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1955-1975). General Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the
US Air Force announced that he would send the country “back into the Stone Ages” by
“releasing over ten thousand tons bombs…” (Vuong 2019, 60).
It all began with Lan, Little Dog’s grandmother’s leaving home in order to put an end
to an arranged marriage. Dire poverty and homelessness soon drove her to prostitution: “…it
was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive.” (Vuong 2019, 23) An American soldier
fell in love with her and they married, but they had to go separate ways when the GI was
called back to the States. Lan and her three daughters spent some time in a refugee camp in
the Philippines. In 1990 they finally immigrated in America. Little Dog, Lan’s grandson and
Hong’s (Rose in English) son, was a toddler when he found himself in a new environment.
His father remained a shadowy figure, mentioned as a violent person who frequently beat his
wife and got himself arrested. The protagonist, his mother and grandmother lived in poverty
in Hartfield, Connecticut. Rose found work in a nail salon and faced daily humiliations from
her American customers. As a small child and adolescent Little Dog was bullied and isolated
because of his color, but also because he did not speak English. The summer he turned
fourteen, he took a job at a tobacco barn, where he met Trevor, an older ‘redneck’ boy, who
was living with his father, a drunk, in a mobile home, survived on junk food and Sprite, and
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was doing drugs. Encouraged by his new friend Little Dog discovered his homosexuality. The
two boys started an ill-fated relationship which gradually became very intense and hurtful. It
ended when Little Dog went to college, and Trevor died of an overdose. Lan, the crazy-wise
grandmother passed away too; her ashes were taken to her native Vietnam, Tien Giang
Province, to the rice paddies where she had come from and where she was buried.
This is in broad lines Little Dog’s story, told in the first person, a tale of race and
immigration, masculinity, addiction, poverty. It is a story of yearning and ache, of a painful
coming of age, a Bildungsroman that oscillates between tenderness and brutality.
Nonetheless, the reader has to piece together the fragmented narrative, the past of
Little Dog’s mother, Rose, and his grandmother, Lan, but also his facing a new life and his
queerness. The major events in the protagonist’s life don’t come in a logical, chronological
succession but as ‘backward revelations’ and “forward recollections” (Bloom 1914, 311).
Therefore, the non-chronological cyclical structure relies on flashbacks which alternate with
incursions into the future that has already happened: “Some people say history moves in a
spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory,
our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed,” (Vuong
2019, 27) states the story teller, at the same time describing the way the novel is built.
It starts when Little Dog is already a writer, and while the tale is unfolded, he jumps
back and forth in time, intertwining traumatic events of his family’s past in Vietnam with the
boy’s sad life in Hartford or the strange encounter with his American grandfather and his
sexual initiation. Little Dog finds out about his birth and the times before his birth from
stories told by Lan: “…the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical
landscapes as open into 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…” (Vuong 2019, 22) The winding track of the story
leads the reader to Little Dog’s childhood when he and his mother and grandmother walk to
C-Town to buy oxtail, but they don’t know the English word for it and have to leave with
Wonder Bread and a jar of mayonnaise, which Rose took for butter. The next chapter brings
us back to Vietnam when Rose was a baby, then Little Dog visits his grandfather, Paul, in
California. The leaps in time are so abrupt that within two paragraphs the years mentioned are
1964, 1997 and 1998. Soon afterwards ten year-old Little Dog is in the nail salon where his
mother gives a pedicure to and old woman with an amputated leg, and is asked to massage the
missing limb too. While recounting the protagonist’s first encounter with Trevor, who will
soon become his lover, the narrator suddenly breaks up the storyline and recalls a childhood
episode: he was playing with hundreds of plastic soldiers on the kitchen floor, and when his
mother came home, he was beaten violently for not having cleaned up: “Before he could
make out his mother’s face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another,
then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother.” (Vuong 2019, 101) Likewise, the sexual scene
with an older boy is closely followed by another childhood episode when Little Dog ran away
from home, but was found by his grandmother and convinced to forgive his violent mom.
Events unfold in a chaotic way: Little Dog comes back from New York where he is a student
to attend Trevor’s funeral, he then tells his mother that he is gay. Other childhood memories
are inserted into the plot; soon afterwards his grandmother’s death is minutely described. In
the end of the novel the young man is in Vietnam where his grandmother’s ashes are to be
buried in Vietnamese soil.
Thus, events move in concentric laps finally reaching a center. In the end, the
protagonist is a changed man in his late twenties, who has come to terms with himself, but
does not have answers to all questions: “Monkeys, moose, cows, dogs, butterflies, buffaloes.
What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story – when our lives
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are in themselves the story of animals.” (Vuong 2019, 242) Little Dog still doesn’t know what
to call his mother, the addressee of the letter, which she will never read because she knows
that she is too old to learn how to read. Is she white or Asian? Is she an orphan, an American,
a mother, a monster?
What strikes the reader most in “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, though, is
Vuong’s ‘wrestling’ with language. The result of this confrontation is the breaking apart of
the pages into the lines of a poem in prose. Undoubtedly, imagery and emotion are the real
topic of the novel. Colors, sounds, smells, and tastes unite in an effort to capture the fleeting
sensations of real crucial moments. The technique reminds us of an impressionistic painting,
like in scenes describing the migration of the monarch butterflies from southern Canada to
central Mexico: “And just as the first one steps off the cliff, onto air, the forever nothing
below, they ignite into the ochre-red sparks of monarchs. Thousands of monarchs pour over
the edge, fan into the white air, like a bloodjet hitting water.” (Vuong 2019, 241) Colors,
contrasts, nuances shape the story, give it credibility and suspense. Thus for instance, when
Lan holding her baby daughter in her arms at a military checkpoint, the bleak environment
and the danger the woman and her child find themselves in is alleviated by the profusion of
colors completing the picture, black, yellow, red -brown, lint-grey, sky-blue. Little Dog’s
mother manifests at the age of forty-six a sudden desire to color. She fills the shapes in
coloring books with magenta, vermilion, marigold, pewter, juniper, cinnamon for hours on
end, and when asked why she does it she simply answers: “I just go away in it for a while.”
(Vuong 2019, 6) She, on the one hand, manages to escape reality, on the other, makes up for
her lost childhood, when she had to leave school at the age of five because the school was
burned down. When eating rice drowned in jasmine tea, the boy and his grandmother taste,
smell and visualize the flagrant colored mashed flower. When Little Dog is plucking his
grandmother’s grey hairs, “The snow in my hair,” (Vuong 2019, 22) in her own words, or
when the bullied little boy is drinking white American milk from a tall glass, the color or lack
of color points at the lack of belonging to their new home: “The milk would erase all the dark
inside me with a flood of brightness.” (Vuong 2019, 27) White as opposed to pure yellow or
Vietnamese makes little Hong a strange apparition among her mates, who want to use a spoon
to scrap off the white of her skin. She spends hours on end in the river in the hope that the
white will just melt away: “Coming home, your jaw would clatter from cold, your arms
pruned and blistered- but still white.” (Vuong 2019, 63) When Little Dog is six, he
understands that a color can be very dangerous. His mother has bought him a hot-pink
bicycle. While riding it the Vietnamese boy is attacked by an older white fat boy, who uses a
key chain to scrap the pink paint off the bike. It is his way of showing that Little Dog is queer
and unwanted. Just like colors and shades, smells are major elements in the telling of the
story. The men working at the tobacco barn “smelled of the fields. Before their boots met the
soil, their bodies, even after morning showers, exuded the salt and sunbaked underscent from
the previous day’s work.” (Vuong 2019, 88) The whole process of picking tobacco leaves
becomes a complex mixture of visual and tactile sensations: “You could hear the water inside
the stems as the steel broke open the membranes, the ground darkening as the plants bled
out.” (Vuong 2019, 89) However, Ocean Vuong creates the most complex mixtures of
sensations in the violently detailed love scenes. Little Dog confesses to his mother that he felt
colors and shades, not words, in Trevor’s company: “Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy
found you with his mouth?” (Vuong 2019, 106) While embracing the two boys forget about
boundaries, contours delineating colors, smells or tastes, and their world becomes a fusion of
all of these. Lan’s death in the end of the letter is described in glaring colors. Mai points to the
‘purple’ feet of the dying woman, but Little Dog sees other colors: “They’re black, burnished
brown at the tips of the toes, stone-dark everywhere else, save for the toenails, which had an
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opaque yellowish tint-like bone itself.” (Vuong 2019, 207) The word ‘purple’ though brings
back a vivid memory to the protagonist. The six or seven years old Little Dog and Lan are
walking along a dirt road by the highway. Beyond the fence Lan notices little purple
wildflowers, and makes him climb the fence and pick the colorful flowers. As a grown-up he
will always associate purple flowers with those he had picked so many years ago. All through
the text colors, smells, tastes – separately or in unison - trigger off powerful sensations which
constitute the very fabric of the story.
Names too acquire a strength of their own. Lan gives her daughter a flower name,
Hong, whereas she chooses Little Dog for her grandson to protect the weakest and smallest of
the family from evil spirits roaming the land in search of healthy children. His previous name,
meaning ‘Patriotic Leader of the Nation’, given by the shaman who witnessed his birth at the
request of his proud father, lost its sense when Vietnam was devastated by war and almost
ceased to exist. Earl Woods, half Native American and half black, and his Vietnamese best
friend, a sworn foe to half of his countrymen, narrowly escape an enemy fire and will be
bound for ever by a name: ‘Tiger’. Tiger Phong being the nickname given by Woods to his
brave friend but also to his son, Tiger Woods, the now so famous golfer. Thus, ‘Tiger’ served
as a link between two soldiers and two countries as well. Tiger Woods called himself
‘Cablinasian’. This portmanteau word, containing his roots, Chinese, Thai, Black, Dutch, and
Native American, signifies a desired bridge between so many people and nations.
Just like names, some recurring common words become highlights. In the nail salon
the word ‘sorry’ is the most frequently pronounced one. The manicurists, including the
boy’s mom, apologize all the time for no apparent reason, even dozens of times in a span of
forty-five minutes. The five letters become an instrument: “It no longer merely apologizes,
but insists, reminds…” (Vuong 2019, 91) ‘Sorry’ is one of the few English words immigrants
use to communicate, but at the same time its repetition sounds like a cry for help. This
happened at the tobacco barn too; the workers repeated the words ‘Lo siento’ whenever they
walked past the owner of the fields. By being sorry they assured their remaining at the barn
and saving money for their families. Besides Spanish words Vuong occasionally uses
Vietamese ones, as in “Ten toi la Lan,“ (My name is Lan) (Vuong 2019, 39) or “Dep qua.”
(It’s beautiful) (Vuong 2019, 29) Both Lan and Rose struggle with English and constantly ask
Little Dog for help. The use of the native tongue in the new country is another sign of lack of
communication and isolation.
Among the myriad confessions the author makes in this book maybe the most
surprising one is his statement that he was very uncertain about how to write, how to express
the ideas and create images, how to master language. Having reached the end of the book you
know that Vuong has certainly won the battle with words. His discourse is liquid, it flows
smoothly like water, the author’s own name pointing to it. The result is a stunning lyrical
work of self-discovery. The book reads like a memoir dealing with immigration, otherness,
homosexuality, brutality, war and trauma. The American-Vietnamese writer makes a very
interesting experiment with language and thus brings a fresh breath to English.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bloom, Harold: The Western Cannon, Hartcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994
Vuong, Ocean: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Jonathan Cape, London, 2019
