On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

A moving story of a gay Vietnamese-American boy, this book has surely touched me. Lots of things happen (at least it felt like it), and the narration style really made me feel like I was witnessing things first hand.

However, while the very poetic language is intriguing at first, and interesting for a long time, it did distract me from what was being said in the first place. I felt like I had to assess and treasure every sentence - while I just wanted to read that book.

This book brings up a wide range of interesting topics from different parts of society, and the world in fact. Sadly, for me, this felt like lots of things were missing in the end because many themes just weren’t developed enough for my preference.

Oftentimes the narrator jumps back and forth between events and locations - certainly a decision for artistic reasons. In this book, this added to the feeling I am constantly missing something.

Overall - an intriguing book that I recommend to lovers of poetic language and a good coming-of-age story, just not quite my cup of tea.

This novel by Ocean Vuong is told from a first-person narrative as an autobiographical story written to the protagonist's mother. But using this as a device, it tells multiple stories simultaneously. Each is almost a parable, and none is independent of another. It takes place in the USA primarily.

The protagonist relates his coming into the world, his childhood, his first love, his violent youth, his grandmother's love for him (and her past life in Vietnam), and his experiences of grief. Entangled are the acts of violence of the Vietnam War, the estrangement of the protagonist from his two nations, drug addiction and abuse, philosophy and thoughts on how words find meaning. The story alone is uncomplicated, and ticks along at a pleasant pace, but the poetic undertones and masterful weaving of story with concept make it a wonderful experience. To paraphrase Vuong's words: This book is not created from the violence of the past, but in spite of it. It is created from beauty, and it is beautiful.

[a:Ocean Vuong|4456871|Ocean Vuong|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561472666p2/4456871.jpg]'s words fill the yawning chasm of the grief felt due to being uprooted, smothering the void with delicate, carefully sculpted words that somehow mask the vicious undercurrent of anguish. Much like the Japanese artform of Kintsugi, Vuong's words meld together the fractured landscape of a war-displaced Vietnamese family, restoring the pieces of an erstwhile happiness, through poetic prose.

[b:On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous|57045282|On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous|Ocean Vuong|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1613198131l/57045282.SX50.jpg|61665003], though essentially a rambling letter in English (in the loosest sense) from Little Dog to his mother (who does not speak the language), is so much more. At its heart, it is a reclamation of life , of embracing new power dynamics in an alien land, of navigating a new 'normal' (though what is normal, really?). Little Dog dances on eggshells around his mother, who speaks almost no English, and struggles to maintain a relationship of respect with her son when they immigrate to the States, their hierarchies being reversed when it is Little Dog, who, with his English, must help his mother find her way about. I stopped several times during my reading of this book to mark sentences, which were ephemerally beautiful, placed just so. His grandmother Lam, a tenuous link to his Vietnamese origins, reminds him of his familial past.

Little Dog's sexuality is an important part of this book, as Vuong details his burgeoning relationship with a white man. This relationship is an uprooting within an uprooting, taking Little Dog further away from his mother than a lack of language ever could. As he struggles to come to terms with his otherness , he finally discloses his sexuality to his mother, in a most mundane setting.

"You want sugar, Ma?" I asked. "What about cream, or actually, maybe a doughnut? Oh no, you like the croissants -"

"Say what you have to say, Little Dog." Your tone subdued, watery. The steam from the cup gave your face a shifting expression.

"I don't like girls."

I didn't want to use the Vietnamese word for it - pê-đê - from the French pédé, short for pédéraste. ... the epithet for criminals"

This was a stunningly beautiful book. There are many themes in this book that I found captivating, but I’ll just mention a couple that resonated with me. First, Vuong does a splendid job here showing how the wars in Vietnam that finally ended with unification in the 1970s left a multi-generational influence on Vietnamese families, especially refugees who sought asylum in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. The protagonist in this story, “Little Dog,” writes a letter to his illiterate mother whose spoken Vietnamese was stunted at an elementary school level due to the war and who never had the opportunity to learn how to read or write. The mother, and to some extent his grandmother, suffer from an incredible host of psychological and physiological problems associated with trauma suffered during the war years in Vietnam. “Little Dog’s” mother is also the offspring of coupling between an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman (Lan). Vuong here illustrates nicely how the legacies of the Vietnam War continue inflicting American culture and society in many unseen ways.

Second, Vuong possesses incredible insight into the lived experience of poverty in the United States. He paints this portrait of poverty through the lens of childhood and adolescence. For example, he illustrates how children are immune (temporarily) to some of the most heartrending realities of living in an impoverished community or being the offspring of impoverished parents. He depicts children screaming and yelling as they run around the back of a run-down tenement building, with the protagonist waxing poetic about how children can find joy in the meanest of circumstance. His depiction of poverty is primarily in Hartford, Connecticut but with a substantial blend of the rural experience as well. He moves seamlessly between describing the harsh realities of urban squalor and the isolated, dark confines of drug infested trailer parks in the countryside. I think that in an American culture that has become increasingly divided, Vuong excels at showing how some experiences, such as poverty, drug addiction, and its associated lexicon, can transcend the normal barriers of race, gender, and ethnicity.

Suffice it to say I found this a very illuminating work.

A friend of mine reviewed this recently and explained it far better than I could: Book Review: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I added a comment there:

I felt very much the same for quite a lot of the parts I have so far read. Bits of it I really liked, because they spoke to me specifically — Little Dog’s first queer experiences, for example — but a lot of it felt really uncomfortably misery-porn without me feeling I was learning a huge amount from it (except a bit more context of wartime Vietnam, maybe). And it was also pretty strange reading something that felt like it was autobiographical but also a roman à clef, y’know?

Interesting and bits of it are great — and [a:Ocean Vuong|4456871|Ocean Vuong|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561472666p2/4456871.jpg] is clearly an exceptional writer — but I DNF’d about halfway through.