On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

The butterflies fly from the north to south to escape the frosts of winter. They never return. They are their children that come back. Butterflies, like people, are immigrants. Perhaps that’s the reason that they have been adapted to serve and symbolise the open borders.  It’s a beautiful metaphor. Like the metaphors in Ocean Wong’s book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. 

The story is actually a letter written from a son with the nickname Little Dog, to his mother, Rose, a Vietnamese immigrant to the United States, who cannot read English. There are several elements in the book, some of them autobiographical as Ocean Yong, like Little Dog, is a Vietnamese-American, who born in Vietnam and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. There is Little Dog’s relationship with two women, his mother and grandmother, who both suffer from mental illness because of everything they suffered during the Vietnam war. And there is also his sexual relationship with a young white American man who is addicted to opioids.  

Little Dog writes this letter to his mother because he is trying to break free. “….. freedom, I am told, is the difference between the hunter and its prey.” It sounds strange but the On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a book about joy and beauty, because, Ocean Vuong writes, “it was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.” But It is also a book about immigration, a book about the United States. It is a story that reflects a truth about the United States, its violent origins and its contemporary history which is also characterised by violence.  It captures the American identity, an identity that was born out of violence. It is a story about those who are destroyed by United States’ violent foreign policy and end up as refuges or immigrants in its shores, enriching the social and cultural fabric of the American life. Little Dog is part of this fabric. He is a product of war. Without the war in Vietnam, his mother wouldn’t exist. She is a mixed-raced woman, the daughter of a white G.I. and a Vietnamese farm girl, who fell in love and got married during the Vietnam war.

I was totally captivated by the language in this book. It is beautiful, lyrical and powerful. It is a language of destruction and possession. At the same time, it becomes an attempt to break free, a lighthouse searching for a way out or a way forward. Linguistically the book is absolutely phenomenal.

“There are times, late at night, when your son would wake believing a bullet is lodged inside him. He’d feel it floating on the right side of his chest, just between the ribs. The bullet was always here, the boy, thinks, older even than himself –and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn’t me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother’s womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around. Even now, as the cold creeps in around him, he feels it poking out from his chest, slightly tenting his sweater. He feels for the protrusion but, as usual, finds nothing. It’s receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.”