Global English Literature: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

.The author?

Ocean Vong

.Biographical information

• 1988: ° Ho Chi Minh (Saigon)

  • Relatively young

• 1990: Two-year-old Vuong and his family eventually arrived in a refugee camp in the Philippines before achieving asylum and migrating to the United States, settling in Hartford, Connecticut. His father abandoned the family after this. Vuong was reunited with his paternal grandfather later in life. Vuong, who suspects dyslexia runs in his family, was the first in his family to learn to read, at the age of eleven.

• Attended Glastonbury High School in Glastonbury, Connecticut (known for academic excellence).

  • Not believed by professor bc Connecticut is pretty advanced cultural state, what did he do from age of 2 to 11? -> sounds extremely unlikely (you are obligated to attend school)

  • how could he attend such a high school if he only learned how to read at age 11

• Studied 19th-century English Fiction at City U of New York. Vuong is openly gay and is a practicing Zen Buddhist.

• 2017: Night Sky with Exit Wounds. First collection of poetry. T. S. Eliot Prize.

• 2019: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

• 2022: Time Is a Mother (poems)

  • Mother died and inspired "Time Is a Mother

Narration

Closely related own life

• temptation beautiful language > sometimes too flowery/hard to understand

Literacy

• epistolary novel (novel written as a series of letters T > one letter written from young boy to his mother)

  • Mother is illiterate > mother will never be able to read it

• "Each word I write, the further away I am from you"

  • To reach his mother but also never read it

    • write the letter (explicit detail homosexual lovemaking)

• "The very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible"

  
  

Connection to Ginsberg

• Ginsberg was gay and poem celbrated gay love + eroticism > American literature never seen before

  • shocking

  • did not have the intention of publishing the poem (father might read it) > but publishers wanted it

• Link?

  • Poem written in a way illusion readership

The novel

• Basic format: Epistolary novel. Little Dog writes a letter to his illiterate mother, Rose.

• “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”

.Family (history)

• How the mother was born:

• Grandma Lan (“Lan meaning Orchid.”) “ran away, at seventeen, from her arranged marriage” (39) Grandfather Paul:

  • Finds out grandmother had worked as sex worker Story about identity (finding out who you are)

“I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves (...)”

“...her schizophrenia only worse now since the war.”

“As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At f ive, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan.”

“The city was being infiltrated by a massive North Vietnamese advance that would later be known as the infamous Tet Offensive. All night Lan lay fetal, her back against the wall, Paul by her side, his standard-issue 9mm pistol aimed at the door as the city tore open with sirens and mortar fire.”

The War

• no memories of the Vietnamese War

• Forms gap between way grandmother and mother experience things > way boy experiences things

• way mom speaks reflection war (from age of 5 never goes back to school)

  • whole generation of people who never learned how to write and read bc of the war

“Mom I am talking to you'“

• after a while, you begin to feel haunted by the mother's silence and her absence -> the deeper you get into the book the more palpable the boy's despair becomes (Mom, I'm talking to you!)

Romantiscism

• the epistolary novel is thé beloved, more popular format of a romantic novel (briefroman)

  Other example: Goethe, "Het lijden van de jonge Werther" (boy who is in love with married woman,

Memory

• That memory at the same time defines you and destroys you. You are defined by memories but in many cases, they make it impossible for you to ever live a normal life again (for example, war survivors) What defines the grandmother: war survivor

• What destroys her: being in America with memories of the war (associates sounds of fireworks with war T cannot associate fireworks with celebration How fatally mixed love and war is in this novel - it means sth to lay next to your boyfriend while the Tet Offensive rages

• “The first time you hit me, I must have been four.”

• “The time you threw the box of Legos at my head.”

• “Stop, Ma. Quit it. Please.”

• “(...) your nose still crooked from his countless backhands.”

• “By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love.”

• “...to be an American boy...”

Violence

• people who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome are more prone to committing acts of violence than other people. So a lot of violence in this family:

• "Perhaps to lay hands on your child, is to prepare them for war "

• Asks Trevor to "fuck him up" during sex ("I am finally getting fucked up by choice") Can be linked to Richard Wright's novel (finally liberated by committing murder -> by choice)

• Trivilization of violence -> constant, casual element of life Novel is divided in paragraphs that don't have much to do with each other (reads more like stanzas) -> representation of how your memory/ brain works

“When we arrived in America in 1990, ...”

Outsidership 1: the immigrant experience

• through language (illiteracy, differences Vietnamese and English)

• Dual experience: leave a lot behind, familiarizing yourself with new (culture, customs)

• America: ideology (you can sign onto, not skin color language)

  • "Even when you looked the part, your tongue betrayed you"

    • Mother looked fair > could pass for white

  • Everybody in America is an outsider (immigrant culture)

  • so maybe America holds out the promise that you can seize to be an outsider - the big lie -- in practice: insiders and outsiders just as radical as rest of the world

• about trevor and him: "We were Americans until we opened our eyes" (literally: the American Dream ends when you wake up') "You've gotta be asleep to believe it"

• “the Little dog” > alterego novel

• Wearing his mother’s white dress: “(...) the kids would call me freak, fairy, fag. I would learn, much later, that those words were also iterations of monster.”

• “someone had shoved my face into the glass”

• “The boy from whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work – want.”

• “ I got what I wanted – a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to het here.”

• Telling his mother:

• Trevor: “please tell me I am not,...”

• “Do you remember the morning, ...”

Outsidership 2: Homosexuality

• American masculinity > How Trevor was raised, feels guilty for putting his “f*gotery” on Trevor

• Wore mother’s white dress to look like her > kid on bike saw

• Language (fairy, f*g > iterations of monsters” > cruelness boys that age (fat, short, gay)

• To be invisible is both a threat and an advantage

• To be seen is necessary but is also a threat (need to be invisible to be safe

“Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war. That night I promised myself I’d never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So began my career as our family’s official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.”

• "Speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war": Vietnamese, the mother tongue, is inseparable from the trauma of the war that shaped the family, suggesting that deeper, perhaps unutterable, pain and history reside there.

• "Never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you": The son takes on the role of translator and advocate, preventing his mother from being silenced by her inability to speak English, a responsibility that shapes his identity.

• "I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask": This highlights the painful necessity of code-switching (shifting between languages), using English as a protective layer or persona to navigate a predominantly white world, enabling others to see him (and by extension, his mother's story) through a familiar lens. 

“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. (...) I was seen – I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe (...)”

t speaks to a profound, almost gravitational pull of something about to happen or could happen, rather than a simple, present desire, often in the context of love or intense connection. 

• I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone." This highlights a profound moment where the narrator, accustomed to invisibility, experiences being truly noticed.

• "I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe." This reveals a core dynamic, often involving the narrator's mother, where survival was linked to remaining unseen, likely due to experiences with war, poverty, or cultural displacement.

• Themes of Identity & Vulnerability: The quote captures the tension between the need to hide and the desire to be seen, a central conflict in Vuong's exploration of queer identity, family history, and finding beauty in a harsh world. 

• The line often precedes a moment of connection, particularly with the boy (John) who becomes the narrator's first love, showing how being seen by someone else can be both terrifying and beautiful, challenging the ingrained lesson of invisibility.

“The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all. I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim – the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.”

“The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.”

It subverts the familiar "one nation, under God, indivisible" pledge, highlighting the pervasive issues of drug epidemics (like opioids affecting Trevor, a character in the book) and state surveillance (drones) that shape contemporary American experience, especially for marginalized communities. 

“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.”

It underscores the briefness of human existence and beauty when compared to geological time, suggesting that gorgeousness, like life, is inherently fleeting, a core idea in Vuong's work. 

Drugs

• Opioid Crisis: The narrative is set during the early days of the opioid epidemic, with characters struggling with prescribed painkillers like OxyContin, which becomes a gateway to heroin.

• Trevor's Addiction: Little Dog's lover, Trevor, develops a severe heroin addiction, illustrating the devastating physical and social costs of drug dependency, often linked to economic hardship and trauma from his abusive father and the tobacco farm work.

• Rose & Little Dog's Family: Little Dog's mother smokes cigarettes, and his grandfather grows marijuana, showing how addiction runs through generations, connected to trauma and mental health struggles.

• Pharmaceutical Critique: Vuong explicitly critiques drug companies, like Purdue Pharma, for marketing opioids as safe, contributing to the crisis.

• Addiction & Trauma: Drug use serves as a way to numb pain, escape trauma (war, abuse), and cope with feelings of otherness and shame, blurring lines between pleasure, pain, and destruction.

• Lyrical & Polemical: Vuong blends poetic language with direct critiques, using drug addiction as a lens to examine American social issues, racism, and the complex entanglement of love and violence.