Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This year, having spent most of the last in some state of “stay-at-home” and meeting by zoom, our book club decided to informally do a second optional book in addition to our monthly selection. Even less formally than that, my friend V and I decided to read this book after it lost the vote to be a main selection for the club.
Ocean Vuong is a Vietmamese-American refugee, whose family fled first to a camp in the Philippines, then to the United States when he was a child. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel, but it has significant autobiographical content. The family history, for example, matches his actual life and family history well. Whether his account of his first romantic and sexual relationship is fully factual or not is less clear, of course.
The family history is fascinating - and a story that I have actually heard a couple times in my personal and professional life. Vuong’s grandmother married an American serviceman and had children with him. Saigon fell when Vuong’s grandfather was home on leave, and he was unable to return to his family. Vuong’s grandmother supported herself (in the book, as a prostitute) and placed her children in different orphanages so they wouldn’t starve. They reunited after the children grew up, but Vuong’s mother fell under suspicion as being of mixed race (and therefore legally ineligible for employment), so they had to flee. After eventually coming the the US, they were able to reunite with Vuong’s grandfather, who had remarried an American woman. Vuong would eventually complete college and become a teacher, poet, and writer.
The origin of his unusual and delightful name is fun: his mother wanted to name him Beach, but with her accent, it….came out as something else. One of her customers suggested Ocean instead.
The book itself is in an interesting form. It is written as a letter by the protagonist, nicknamed “Little Dog” (essentially Vuong himself) to his illiterate mother. The story is non-linear, flashing back and forth between the past and present, and includes the family history as recounted by the grandmother. It takes a bit of time to piece all of the history together, particularly the middle section involving the narrator’s abusive, then absent father. The style also switches around a lot. Parts of it read like a stream of consciousness poem, while others are more traditional narratives.
The central event, if you will, is Vuong’s romantic and sexual relationship with Trevor, a white boy that, if he lived in my part of the country, would be described as an Okie. (This being set on the east coast, not quite the same thing, but still the mobilehome, farmer stock, redneck attitude thing.) Trevor, for cultural and masculinity reasons, insists he isn’t gay, and will soon grow out of this relationship. Little Dog, on the other hand, is able to embrace his sexuality, and comes out to his mother as a teen. Trevor’s story is achingly sad too. His mom abandoned him, his father is an abusive drunk, and Trevor gets addicted to opiates after a broken bone. It is an all too familiar story in rural white America right now. The whole relationship is written with an honesty and gentle affection.
There are some other scenes that stood out for various reasons. Little Dog’s relationship with his grandfather is touching and awkward. In the book (not sure about real life), Paul is an old hippie who grows a lot of his own food - and some illicit substances too. He is not biologically related to Little Dog, as it turns out. Grandma, kicked out of her house for refusing an arranged marriage with an old man, has had to sell her body, and is already pregnant with Little Dog’s mother when she marries Paul. The scene where this is revealed to Little Dog is again, brutally honest. Paul himself seems unable to really figure out his feelings, which is why he decides to make the revelation, but then insists to a neighbor that Little Dog is indeed his grandson. Both of them eventually appear to come to peace with the realization that family is what you are, not your genes.
Another touching yet uncomfortable scene is when grandma dies of cancer. The family is, shall we say, deeply dysfunctional. Grandma suffers from mental illness, probably a combination of schizophrenia and PTSD, and mom has a combination of traumas and displacement that leads her to alternate between loving and abusive, functional and unable to function, and combined with her difficulties with English and the change in culture leaves her more isolated than either grandma or Little Dog. It’s very real, and the complexities of family and human relationships and even the human psyche are portrayed memorably.
The worst scene, in terms of horror, is the one where some soldiers eat a Macaque’s brains while it is still living. I am guessing that this was a real story that Ocean’s grandmother told him, and it is traumatizing on multiple levels. As I am sure it is intended to be. And it is mixed up with the flight from Vietnam and a strongly implied rape. I’d be tempted in another context to say it was gratuitous, but it actually does tie in with both the story itself and the philosophical points that Vuong hits - trauma eats our brains alive, and the powerful, whether young men with guns or the systems which grind the poor, feed their own virility on the destruction of others.
The language itself is often beautiful, sometimes a bit turgid, and the ending drags just a little with more musing than I think necessary after the narrative hits its peak then apotheosis. That’s not a huge flaw in a book this short, but I felt like the last ten or so pages would have either been better omitted or placed elsewhere in the book. That said, there are some real highlights where the writing is lovely. Here are some examples, starting with a few from the opening chapter, which is an explanation to his mother of why he is writing the story.
I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence - I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
And later:
The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made. But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered.
Little Dog’s mother cannot handle this “reversal in hierarchies” and explodes at him. This is, alas, all too familiar. Bill Gothard taught that the hierarchy never reversed - that God literally talked to parents to tell them what their children should do, even as adults. Even with parents who didn’t believe they believed this, it caused difficultly in the inevitable change from parent-child to equals, and in some things, a reversal.
Later in the book, Little Dog explains how he became responsible for being the public face of the family.
Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war. That night I promised myself I’d never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So began my career as our family’s official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.
Growing up in California, which has more foreign-born residents than any other state, I was in constant contact with immigrant families. This sounds so familiar. Long before I knew the term “code switch,” I saw it in action. The children do straddle both cultures - usually amazingly well - serving as the way that the whole family finds its way in a new culture and language.
The explanation of “Little Dog” was fascinating.
What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock as I was, is named after the most despicable things: a demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard - little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched - and alive.
Speaking if interesting cultural differences, there is one about reticence to talk about female genitals. Apparently in Vietnamese culture, speaking of them between mother and son is taboo. So…
“That’s my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much.”
Let’s just say that American women didn’t know how to respond to this one....
There is also a great line about the military checkpoint that the family had to pass.
A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission...A woman, a girl, a gun. This is an old story, one anyone can tell. A trope in a movie you can walk away from if it weren’t already here, already written down.
That term, “weaponized permission” is devastating. It encapsulates the refugee’s powerlessness. Those with the guns (and the money) can grant or withhold permission for the helpless to flee for their lives. Our who immigration “debate” really comes down to “what should the people with the guns and therefore the weaponized permission do about desperate people?” Should we use our guns to deny permission to live? The answer for too many is “yes.” When we should be asking instead “what gives us the right to deny our weaponized permission to live?” You can see more of this in one of the poetic sections.
I’m not with you ‘cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain.
Even though I am white and a born citizen, I feel this one. I too know people that Trump and many of my Right Wing acquaintances and relatives want to deport. And horrified that there seems to be no way to make them see the tremendous damage they wish to inflict on real human beings. I cannot seem to find a way to explain why they should care about other people. But even those who are sure they are good people seem to have this hesitation, as the book notes later, in an extended section on success as a poet and the condescension he experienced even from those who encouraged him.
They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write your names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.
Ironically, on the back cover, Celeste Ng (author of Little Fires Everywhere - which is excellent) notes that the book will indeed be called “necessary” and “urgent” - and her praise is definitely not condescending. After all, she too has likely experienced the same things as an Asian American immigrant writer. There is one final passage that I really found perceptive.
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?
This kind of hopefulness in the midst of trauma and tragedy pervades the book. Even in the maelstrom of his messed up and often abusive family, Little Dog (and presumably Vuong) finds the good, finds relationship, and finds a way forward. His attitude toward his family remains affectionate, even as he airs the laundry, so to speak. And likewise toward Trevor and his equally messed up, racist and bigoted family, and toward our messed up, racist and violent America. (Another great poetic line is “The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.”) Vuong’s approach reminds me a lot of James Baldwin’s famous line:
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
In the last decade, there has been an explosion of new, diverse voices, insisting on the right to love America, to be embraced as American, and to criticize her when she fails to live up to her ideals. These voices are young, non-white, often LGBTQ, immigrants or children of immigrants, and what is truly the face of America for the 21st Century, no matter how much the older, whiter bigots hate that reality and try to fight against it. Vuong is another of those voices, with an intriguing story, a beautiful skill with the language, and a tenderness that refuses to be hardened by trauma and tragedy.
***
On that note, while an incomplete list, here are some of those young voices that I have enjoyed over the last few years:
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
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