Wow.
What can I write? Ocean Vuong writes so beautifully, even when writing about terrible things, ordinary things, or necessary things.

I thought I would share some quotes here to share the exquisite beauty that he composes from words. Instead of going back to the book to find the few I had the presence of mind to mark, I decided to google some quotes. I found a few pages and then I thought, no, you must immerse yourself in his words and find them yourself. Some of the quotes were from his poetry, which I have not read, but I could read them and recognise them. I have never been big on poetry, despite the best efforts of my dear college roommate. I guess I have to admit that I prefer a linear story.

This is not a linear story. There are parts from childhood, youth, and adulthood, but the parts appear in the order that is necessary for telling the story. It works. I am carried along and give in to the flow of words as Ocean Vuong lays them out.

So many parts moved me with feelings of sadness, or a sense of beauty, or an ache. I thought for a moment whether I should stop and let a passage sink in or settle, but I couldn't stop. I listened to the audiobook read by Ocean Vuong, and I just went with the flow. I loved his voice. It held all the emotions. Sometimes the story went beyond words inside my head and stopping would not have done anything. I wanted more words. When he described the times when his mother worked at the nail salon, I hurt inside. This was just after the murder of eight people, six of whom were Southeast Asian women, in Atlanta, so his words were like walking on glass. I cannot remember now if this was in the same part where he talked about the word "sorry", as in "I'm sorry" or "so sorry". His words here (as elsewhere) held worlds.

This is a story that blossoms into life when read aloud. I think I might buy this book now to keep and treasure. Thank you, Libby app, for introducing me to Ocean Vuong and his words. If I read them in print, I will hear them in my head with Ocean Vuong's voice. They will always be gorgeous.

Update: I came back to share the few quotes I remembered to capture.

"I know. It's not fair that the word 'laughter' is trapped inside the word 'slaughter'."

"He laughed. The fake one you use to test the thickness of a silence."

"A page turning is a wing lifted with no twin and therefore no flight and yet we are moved." [Not sure about punctuation because I heard it and didn't see it.]

"Because I am your son, what I know of work, I know equally of loss. And what I know of both, I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I've never felt. The palms already calloused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and the reckoning of a dream. How you come home night after night, plop down on the couch and fall asleep inside a minute. [...] A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones, with or without citizenship. Aching, toxic, and underpaid. I hate and love your battered hands for what they can come to be." From chapter 7 where he describes the nail salon in which his mother works from his memory as a 10-year-old.