"they will tell you that great writing "breaks free" from the political, thereby "transcending" the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They will say this is achieved through craft above all. Let's see how it is made, they'll say; as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.

we'll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe." pg 187

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What I love about this book is its way of giving you the emotional impact of his life events contemporaneously with describing it; there's no better way i can articulate this to someone that hasn't read it. Many books will read you sequential events and observe impact after the fact but in taking the emotional attention to detail you anticipate and know the endings, emotionally, before they arrive. I don't think this makes the book predictable per se as it does give minute events and occurrences the color and impact they clearly have on the author that would otherwise sound mundane and commonplace on paper.


some of the common criticism I've read about this book being that it is overwritten is understandable as I think at times it is the book's best and worst qualities. If Vuong however was to rewrite On Earth into a 600 page magnum opus from the 250 pager it was at publication I'd still read it again. The two primary focuses of this book, his mother and his first love, I think would hold strong between other accounts expanded upon from Vuong's life only briefly discussed in this book (i.e. I was half anticipating to hear more about his friends than just passing mentions). Even though this book is so packed with tangential topics and intersecting issues that primarily are framed to stem from his relationship with the mother and first love, I still sometimes came away wishing Vuong discussed more about himself, his own complexities in reaction to the world and people around him rather than simply as an observer, as I think he sometimes comes off as just that.


I agree that Vuong's foremost skill as a poet in some ways shows what is almost a limitation to slow pacing where it isn't always warranted, whereas a fiction writer would have a more adept capacity for indicating urgency, anger, etc. But this book is clearly in its structure painted with bittersweet melancholy and rumination/something akin to a tolerant nostalgia from the very fact of it being a letter written to his mother that cannot read English. This is something I think the reader can and should accept at first introduction to the book.

But the deliberate explanation and rumination on minutia is exactly what I love about this book. I think it would be unusual for a nonlinear memoir written to the author's mother to adopt any other narrative strategy. It packs an emotional punch I don't think audiences are used to receiving quite in that way; the impact is not in an event unfolding but in the mundanities of life that go unchallenged and uninterrogated because they are learned responses to our environment. Our traumas are remembered after the fact in a form diluted by memory, becoming more of a hazy mythos that dictates our underlying decision making rather than some directly attributable cause-and-effect. Vuong recounts encounters with abuse and addiction exactly the way most ordinary people remember them; people do not remember these things in their day to day life as play by plays but as stillframes that insert themselves back into everyday life as reminders and motifs. Everything bleeds together and compounds in the most mundane of human encounters, simultaneously exposing the vibrancy in such occurrences (fuck coca cola).

I don't think a book has to be perfect to be five stars as this approach to media analysis and criticism is about as oversimplifying of a body of work as an SAT score. Sometimes this book is overripe with visual metaphors to the point of redundancy, making it at times harder to sift between recurring motifs that matter and the occasional one liner reference to the lit end of a burning cigarette as a "ruby bead". I think this book is a modern classic not because it is perfect but because it tells a deeply political story in the most personal and impactful way. Where most books and media discussions of class, race, and queerness illustrate these matters in a very broad way at the grand scale, it very rarely illustrates what these issues compounding in lived experience looks and FEELS like. To describe and articulate what compounding, broad systemic issues look like in the personal is incredibly difficult and requires a talented author like Vuong to represent as the mosaic it is. Vuong's choice of words is artful and deliberate but requires a careful meditation on the part of the reader too and if the reader is willing to engage they will be rewarded in turn. It was a pleasure to read this book and I plan to read it again.