~ On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong ~
Gorgeous is a good description for the beautiful language in this novel. But difficult could be another word, to describe the storyline. I confess I read the novel while only half comprehending what was going on for most part. The novel oscillates between past and future, times and scenes, with no markers and no signposts, leaving the reader somewhat lost a good part of the way. But even so, every page and every sentence was wonderful to read, so rapturous and rich was the language throughout. It created a world of its own, as all skilled writers do, and it was a wonderful experience to be immersed in this world – less the world of the actual situations being described in the plot, than the world of emotion and imagination that the words conjure.
The story is supposedly the author’s letter to his mother. The protagonist has a very troubled relationship with his mother. She is violent and loving, having endured terrible trauma in her life before coming to the US, abused by her husband, worked extremely hard at her nail salon, protective of her son while demanding he learns to survive. She is clearly suffering from PTSD, and is also schizophrenic.
Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I’ve never felt, the palms already callused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous – and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream […] your hands in your lap like two partially scaled fish.
p79
In the household is also Lan, the protagonist’s grandmother, who tries to shield her grandson with stories and comfort and food.
The protagonist is not just the descendent of 2 generations of Vietnamese migrants fleeing terrible brutality and persecution, the loss of a country and culture haunting them, he is also gay, and this adds yet another layer he needs to hide of his identity. The passages in this novel of the protagonist’s first experience of sex at 15, with his friend, Trevor, a white boy who is the grandson of the owner of the tobacco fields where the protagonist works, are explosive passages, tender and lyrical. They are also beautifully nuanced:
What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place
p96
Vuong is first and foremost a poet, and much of his prose reads like poetry. Intriguing also is his way of putting things, of fracturing the known and making it unfamiliar; for example, he expresses the precarity of migrants thus:
Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances
p125
His grandmother’s name, Lan, means Lily, while the protagonist’s mother is called Rose.
The flower, the color, the shade. […] A flower is seen only towards the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to becoming brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose, bush rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.
Only when I utter the word do I realise rose is also the past tense of rise. That in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. [..] You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.
p125
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of reflection in the novel about language, voice, identity. The novel does not dwell on the Vietnam war, but on the effect of it on people, and on their language and selves:
A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire…
p38
He also describes how 2nd generation migrant children typically have to speak for their parents in public, because they have learnt English more quickly, and must, from a very young age, already represent their families to the mainstream society.
Vuong is keen to reveal the mechanics of writing. He puts it beautifully in the letter to his mother, which is also of course the address to the reader:
I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck – the pieces floating, finally legible.
p191
In that way, he explains why the novel is written less as a coherent narrative, and more as glittering fragments of memory. There are some passages that sound almost autobiographical in terms of how the author sculpts his novel, wields his craft:
You are a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse […] “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ em dead.
p179
Throughout the novel, the condition of migrants is explored, but in a very fresh, unclichéd way, even if the experiences are similar to that of so many other migrants. Vuong highlights, for example, the typical self-erasure of migrants —
“to be invisible in order to be safe” (p96)
”Remember,” you said each morning before we stepped out in cold Connecticut air, “don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re already Vietnamese” (p219)
Later in his life, when he returns to Saigon, the protagonist says those words to himself again, “You’re already Vietnamese”, with a very different meaning.
Another condition of the migrant: to apologise for everything, always, both to ingratiate and mollify, a self-defense mechanism.
In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. […] It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.
And yet it is not only so in the nail salon, Ma. In those tobacco fields, too, we said it. “Lo siento” […] How the day after, we began work not with “Good morning” but with “Lo siento.” The phrase with its sound of a bootstep sinking, then lifted, from mud. The slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue.
p91-92
The depiction of migrants and desperation – not exactly of destitution, but definitely of danger and deprivation – is uncompromising and yet lyrical in this novel.
In my Hartford, where fathers were phantoms, dipping in and out of their children’s lives, like my own father. Where grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and ba ngoais were kings, crowned with nothing but salvaged and improvised pride and the stubborn testament of their tongues as they waited on creaking knees and bloated feet outside Social Services for heat and oil assistance smelling of drugstore perfume and peppermint hard candies, their brown oversized Goodwill coasts dusted with fresh snow as they huddled steaming down the winter block – their sons and daughters at work or in jail or overdosed or just gone, hitching cross-country on Greyhounds with dreams of kicking the habit, starting anew, and then ghosting into family legends.
p213
(In this long sentence, there is something of Mohsin Hamid’s cadences also.)
Vuong’s novel explores the being trapped in a condition, whether of migrancy, or of being gay, or of being the son of such a mother.
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. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough” p216. In Saigon, he watches singers in drag at a funeral, gradually realising the elaborately dressed women are men. “It’s through the drag performers’ explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. As much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is still a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worse, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response.
p226
The novel presents the poignant in simple, understated terms, magnifying the poignancy:
I remember walking with you to the grocery store, my father’s wages in your hands. How, by then, he had beaten you only twice – which meant there was still hope it would be the last.
p221
It matters very little that the novel does not follow any particular chronological order, that the reader is tossed from memory to memory in the narrator’s letter to his mother in no particular order. The novel is not a story being imparted, but a life experience, a set of perspectives, a lyrical gift of things felt and seen and known. The writing is so beautiful that it is only the journey than matters, the destination is not in question at all.
Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicentre. 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 through the fruit, failed to spoilt it.
p231
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