On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong...
is a letter by first-generation Vietnamese American, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother, Rose. They live with his grandmother, her mother, Lan, meaning orchid. He describes himself as a “queer yellow faggot.” The family lives surrounded by poverty and drugs. “To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
Little Dog is writing about his life from the perspective of his twenty-eight years. On one hand, he escaped his childhood poverty to attend college. “I, the first in our family to go to college, squandered it on a degree in English.” On the other hand, he is surrounded by death. His teen lover, Trevor, dies from an overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl at the age of 22. His grandmother died of bone cancer, not diagnosed until it was stage four, and death was imminent.
His mother worked in a nail salon where the hours were long, the chemicals dangerous, and she had to constantly demean herself for tips. “In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable.”
The book includes vivid scenes of Little Dog’s sex life with Trevor, drug use, and life during the Vietnam War. The writing is poetic, but, for me, that wasn’t enough to balance the brutality and abuse. Depressing.
What genre does this book fit into? The author acknowledges the English Department at Brooklyn College for teaching him, “that rules are merely tendencies, not truths, and genre borders only as real as our imaginations small.”
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