On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. 

Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed  in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

A story of Mother and daughter(s); daughter and son. Son and Trevor. Sisters Rose and Mai. Grandfather. 

And the Buffalo 

Old Grandma "Her skin had stopped trying, the eyes fallen into her skull, as if peering from inside the brain itself. She resembles a wood carving, shriveled and striated with deep lines. The only indication that she's alive is her favorite yellow blanket, now grey, rising and falling on her chest. 

You say her name the fourth time, and her eyes open, searching each of our faces. 

Every grain of rice you leave behind is one maggot you eat in hell. 

I remember looking at you for a long time and, because I was six, I thought I could simply transmit my thoughts into your head if I stared hard enough. I remember crying in range. How you had no idea. How you put your hand underneath my shirt and scratched my back anyways. I remember sleeping like that, calmed - my crushed cow expanding on the nightstand like a slow-motion color bomb. 

The possession of a name, after all being all they share. 'Lan' meaning Orchid. 

Rose past sense of Rise. 

You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood. 

And because I am your son, I said, "Sorry". Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.

Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still untill their children belong to someone else. 

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus - that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

A comma superimposed by a period  the mouth so naturally makes. Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? 

We had decided, shortly after we met, because our friends were already dying from overdoses, to never tell each other goodbye or goodnight. 

What were we before we were we?

What Simone Weil said: Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying "I".

To ask what's good? was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another. 

With stunning grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. 

The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

Yes there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name -Lan - in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. From that a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son. 

All this time I told myself we were born from war - but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. 

Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed though the fruit, failed to spoil it. 

As Vuong explains in his 2016 poetry collection, “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” his grandfather was a U.S. soldier who found a farm girl in Vietnam. “Thus my mother exists,” he writes. “Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.”

What Vuong does in this novel with language and form, how he  moves between poetry and prose, is extraordinary. 

They say if you want something bad enough you'll end up making a god out of it. But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma?

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can't tell the difference between a sunset and sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me - and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving, I think of  the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn't so much surprised by its effect - how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves - but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exist only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted. 

Reading is a privilege made possible with what you lost. You believe in reincarnation. You'll come here , may be name will be Rose again, and you'll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. May be then, in that life and in this future, you'll find this book and you'll know what happened to us. And you'll remember. Maybe. 

“The past tense of sing is not singed”  - Hoa Nguyen

The past tense of "sing" is "sang," not "singed." While "singed" is a word that means to burn slightly or to scorch, it. John Cardenas.

"Freedom...is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey." ~ Bei Dao's Poem "Accomplices" (The August Sleepwalker)

“All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening.”