“Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy, you just keep moving forward with what you have or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes – or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that-yes-your name is still attached to a living thing.”
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeou, hit me like I was walking on a slippery road amidst snowfall in mid-December. I couldn’t stop reading it, as if those printed words were the only thing keeping me sane, or like a rope still attached to that unbroken, pristine body of humanity, being human, if I leave, I would be broken and unhinged. I was unable to leave and yet at the same time, I was unable to stop desiring for a moment of escape, a gasp of breath, after what seemed like years of vicariously surviving a war.
Neither of us were whole, not Vuong, not me, because no one is, in the aftermath of a war so brutalthat it stays, in your stories, in your childhood, in the creases of your palm. The bloody end still flowing inside your memory like a wound inflicted yesterday. This book is Ocean Vuong’s first novel, it contains letters written by Vuong himself to his illiterate mother. He comes undone on the pages because the very fact that his mother could never read it made it easier for him to bare himself.
His grandmother named him “Little dog” because, “to love something is to name it after something so worthless, it might be left untouched and alive”, and Vuong is a wound in the fabric of the reality of the world, bleeding onto the paper. In this heartwarming and gut-wrenching novel, he assumes the voice of Little dog, who writes to his mother without building up facades, like stumbling down a hilltop, finding anything or clinging on to anything that would prevent him from falling into a void of oblivion painful enough to break apart his soul or the thread still binding him to his history, or his mother’s.
This story is about a little boy and his mother sharing several emotional bonds, about years spent in nail salons such that the pungent odor started feeling like the familiarity of home to them. This book is about forbidden love, about coming out during times when you could not even think about being brave enough to love another man, this book captures the familial roller-coaster in its essence. It is anything but an easy read. This book has managed to take me to places inside me that I could never reach, a brush of the dark, unreal and surreal, where sorrow and pain and ache for belonging live as one of the thousand variations of love and acceptance.
Our actions motivated by our emotions but under-guided by our circumstances, our sorrow, our helplessness, immersed as we are in ourselves and our addictions, but undergirded by our compassion and our connections, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous encompasses a story about oneself as well as piercing the deafening silence that arises from not being heard. A stunning mixture of urgency and grace, moments of unspeakable regrets, all intertwining into a journey of how to save each other in this cruel world without forsaking who we are.
“I am writing to reach you- even if one word I put down is one word further away from where you are.”
There are instances in this book that will suddenly make you feel human, “have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape away from you?”
One summer, he fell in love with a boy and he wrote about it in his novel, about the feeling of a new romance, of fear intermingled with ecstasy, knowing him through all his hatred “because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.
Reluctantly but driven through love, Vuong came out to his mother, in the time where there was no acceptance of any homosexual love, he bared hissoul to his mother,
“Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth?”
“There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words,but shades, penumbras.”
This novel is about self-acceptance and moments of feeling away from yourself. [RM4]
Each word, each sentence more desperate, deeper than the last one, a story about childhood lived as immigrants from Vietnam to America and life lived with reminiscence of the Vietnam Warlurking behind in the shadows.
“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
The answer could never be easy, Little dog, in this novel, writes about perishing spontaneity and the ephemeral reality of love, dragging the uncertainty of the answers from his own heart, and spilling it all onto the papers, in the world outside.
“Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?”
This novel raises questions about love, life and familial relationships which are never easy to explore. Reading this is like sitting though all the seasons at once, finding solace somewhere in between, finding acceptance disguised as anger, and beautiful undertones of happiness, in this somber but ultimately hopeful novel. “I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else.”
-Nishita Sharma