Written by Sophia Staffiero
Reading time: 11 minutes
Vuong’s debut epistolary novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a series of letters addressed by the protagonist ‘Little Dog’ (whose life, in many ways, mirrors that of the author’s) to his illiterate mother, Rose. With these letters we are guided through a rich and painful family history, one whose origins is rooted in Vietnam and the Vietnamese war and is sprawled across oceans to the Hartford, Connecticut (US). It is through this journey of violence and displacement, we are made witness to both the wider themes of war, addiction, race, and class, as well as the more intimate discussions surrounding domestic violence, (toxic) masculinity, and belonging. While the reader finds liberation in the undeniable strength of a mother and son’s ability to out-stand a series of traumatic events and in the possibility of reclaiming one’s narrative, they are also equally met with the debilitating consequence of the characters’ many years spent suppressing their voices.
From the beginning of the novel, the reader is made privy to the tensions which exist between notions of ‘Americanness’ and ‘otherness,’ with many of the early memories of Little Dog brimming with questions of what it means to be ‘American.’ To give body to such an abstract topic, Vuong utilises textures and objects to gently unravel solidified notions of Americanness. In this way, much like Gatsby’s material wealth in The Great Gatsby, Rose’s white dress becomes a physical embodiment of the ‘American dream’:
‘[…]The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on the back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. “Do I look like a real American?” you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use. A chance. I nodded, grinning.’
(P9)
Although this possibility of belonging exists, throughout the whole novel there is an undercurrent of the impossibility of realising such ‘chance’ which Vuong manifests through several motifs, most notably, the constant need for translation between the two cultures:
‘You lifted your finger and, speaking into the blanket, said, “Am I happy?”
It wasn’t until I saw the mood ring that I realised you were asking me, once more, to interpret another portion of America.’
(P33)
Drawing on Barthes’ Semiotic theory, Vuong teases out the tension which exists between the two cultures that have permeated through Little Dog’s being and experiences. He explores the disjuncture between these two ways of being and belonging that manifests on a formative level (of spoken language), presenting a possible resolution through non-verbal communication, which operates as a bridge between the two:
‘Two languages cancel each other out, suggest Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skins and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.
It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now – as Lan called me, “Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.” And we knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense – that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.‘
(P33)
What emerges is not only a clear distinction between verbal expressions of love and body language and an attempt to marry the two, but fundamentally an underlying irreconcilability between the two cultures. Interestingly, Little Dog seems only capable of formulating his thoughts on culture and identity through the lens of Americanness, with Vietnam always propped up against this concept. This forces the reader to acknowledge the inevitable truth that Americanness, as a normative line, is always the ‘default.’
Yet, despite this ostensible irreconcilability between the two cultures, threaded throughout the narrative is an elusive and unspoken interconnection laced between them, as hints of the Vietnamese war lurk in the background of the mundane, a reminder of how the war seeps into the fabric of everyday and keeps the two geographically disconnected parts, bound:
‘One night, a day or two before Independence Day, the neighbours were shooting fireworks from a rooftop down the block. [..] I was asleep on the living room floor, wedged between you and Lan, when I felt the warmth of her body, which was pressed all night against my bank, vanish. When I turned she was on her knees, scratching wildly at the blankets. Before I could ask what was wrong, her hand, cold and wet, grabbed my mouth. She placed her finger over her lips.
(P19)
‘Shhh. If you scream,’ I heard her say ‘the mortars will know where we are.’
In a similar vein, Vuong manages to interweave the bigger societal happenings with the mundane, showing how the symbiotic conditioning of the macro and micro creates a closed feedback loop, in which past histories and traumas shape the present.
‘It was the summer of 2003, which meant Bush had already declared war on Iraq, citing weapons of mass destruction that never materialised, when the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?” played on every radio station […] It was the summer Tiger Woods would go on to receive the PGA Player of the Year for the fifth time in a row and the Marlins would upset the Yankees, it was two years before Facebook and four before the first iPhone, Steve Jobs was still alive, and your nightmares had just started getting worse, and I’d find you at the kitchen table at some god-awful hour, butt naked, sweating, and counting your tips in order to buy “a secret bunker” just in case, you said, a terrorist attack happened in Hartford.’
(P86)
The use of this simple timeline is a more obvious display of Vuong’s usually subtle task of demonstrating how the interconnectedness of seemingly separate events in history are intertwined and become products unto themselves. In a similar vein, Vuong is intentional in crafting ‘Little Dog’ to embody not only his own experiences as a gay, Vietnamese-American man, but also to open up his unique experiences to integrate with universal human questions of what it means to be ourselves, to relate to others, and to help others without losing who we are. He is therefore not isolating in his narrative as while Little Dog’s story is his own, it is framed in the wider context of existential givens, such as the (im)possibility of communication and the loneliness which many of us are familiar with.
‘There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.
I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?’
(P62)
In line with this month’s themes of ANCESTORS and CROSSROAD, Vuong’s novel is a powerful exploration of what it means to carry both the violence and voices of those who precede us. Through his protagonist, Little Dog, we are reminded of the ways in which our ANCESTORS and their experience reincarnate and resurface in our own lives, while the friendship between Little Dog and Trevor is a reminder of the important encounters with others which we will inevitably experience at CROSSROADS.
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