Published in 2019, this is by Ocean Vuong, whose family fled Viet Nam when he was just two years old.

I'd been interested in his work for a while -- all the more so after watching The Kindergarten Teacher last year. The novel is dedicated to Vuong's mother, who died of cancer the year it was published (but not before she had had the chance to proudly relish his success).

The evocative title originally headed a piece in Vuong's previous volume of poetry (Night Sky With Exit Wounds, published in 2016).

Our narrator is Little Dog (so named to make him seem worthless to any passing evil spirits). He is not directly Vuong, but shares many characteristics with him, and the book is written in the form of a letter -- a long one, with many digressions -- to his mother, Rose, who he knows will never read it, firstly because her English is poor, and secondly because she can't read in any language.

My audio-version was very beautifully read by the author himself. He perfectly pitches both the poignancy and the humour of the book, and it was an enjoyable listen. But it actually doesn't work as an audio-book... It's not just that it is written in fragment form, or that the timeframe jumps around (a lot). It's more that the language is richly poetic, and there's too much to think about as the spoken words glide by. It's a book whose words you need to see in front of you, because you need to dwell on them. Much of it is very beautiful, very serpentine. Some of it is distinctly elliptical, and as the book progresses, that element increases.

So I located a text in the Internet Archive. And as I went through it a couple of times, I started to see how intricately it's put together -- as the themes loop backwards and forwards, the characters' portraits gradually take shape, touch by touch, and the extended animal metaphors -- of butterflies, macaques, buffaloes, calves -- are woven in and out of the warp of the story to add a layer of tragic, elemental solidarity.


There's nothing as brief and gorgeous as a flower...

Little Dog was born just outside Saigon, and his family arrives in the US in 1990. They go to live in Hartford, Connecticut. That's the Hartford of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Hartford, where we stayed when other Vietnamese immigrants fled to California or Houston. Where we made a kind of life digging in and out of one brutal winter after another."

Things are not in the least easy for this kid. From the beginning, he is bullied because he is Vietnamese (Rose urges him to keep a low profile: "Remember... don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re already Vietnamese"), and because he is perceived as effeminate (homophobic persecution will only increase as the novel progresses). His father, who was regularly violent towards his mother, is no longer in his life. But his mother is regularly violent towards him.

Rose, her early life marked by the war in Viet Nam, is clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Her education stopped in second grade, at the age of five, when her school was destroyed in a napalm raid. "Our mother tongue, then," says Little Dog, "is no mother at all -- but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war." By the 1980s, the war was over, but poverty was not, and her husband and his family forced her to abort their first child because there was nothing to eat. Rose is half-American. Her father's identity is unknown, and back in Viet Nam, she was persecuted because of her skin colour and history.

Which brings us to the other central character in Little Dog's home life: His grandmother, Rose's mother, Lan. She chose her own name, which means lily, when she left her arranged marriage at the age of 17, taking her first child, Mai, with her. She suffers from schizophrenia, a condition worsened by the war, and she sometimes experiences traumatic flashbacks. Not surprising. There is an extended scene, harrowingly powerful, where Lan and her infant daughter have to face armed soldiers at a US checkpoint in 1968, a burning dwelling "that, moments ago, was filled with human voices", within sight and smell. On leaving that first marriage, she earned a living for herself and her daughter by becoming a sex worker to American GIs. Here in her new country, she often tries to protect Little Dog from Rose's rages.

Lan also profoundly influences him with her story-telling skills: "Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed. Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral... Shifts in the narrative would occur -- the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is reseen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone."



We also meet Paul, an American serviceman (not a client of Lan's, we're specifically told), who married her in Saigon when she was already four months pregnant with Rose. Little Dog initially doesn't know that this kindly man is not his biological grandfather, and feels untethered by the revelation when it comes. But when Paul suggests Little Dog may no longer want to call him grandpa, the boy replies: "I don't got any other grandpa. So I wanna keep calling you that." Paul's acknowledgement is hugely important to the unmoored boy. It's not until the end of the book that we find out why Paul was mostly missing from their lives. He went back to the US in 1971 to visit his supposedly sick mother. But the sickness was a ruse, and his brother intercepted all Lan's letters. Eventually he learns that Lan and her daughters had to leave Saigon after it fell to the northern forces. But "by the time the Salvation Army called him to let him know there was a woman with a marriage certificate with his name on it looking for him in a Philippine refugee camp, it was already 1990. He had, by then, been married to another woman for over eight years."

The final key character is Trevor. Little Dog meets him when they're both working on a tobacco farm outside Hartford. Trevor is the farmer's grandson, and he makes Little Dog finally feel he has been "seen": "I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe." Trevor's father is an alcoholic, prey to fits of rage and xenophobic tendencies that feed on memories of the war in Viet Nam. Trevor says he hates his father, and Little Dog recalls: "Up until then I didn't think a white boy could hate anything about his life." Trevor leans to the wild side, shooting things up, getting high, totalling his dad's car... He's gay, but struggles to accept that this is a permanent part of his identity (his and Little Dog's early experimentation is moving and heart-warming, if a little more explicit than I would ideally opt for).

Trevor dies of an overdose at the age of 22... We learn that he broke his ankle when he was 15, and was prescribed OxyContin, an opioid: "After a month on the Oxy, Trevor's ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict." His fate is symptomatic of a wave of drug-related deaths. "Seven of my friends are dead," Little Dog tells us, "Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl. I don't celebrate my birthday any more."



It's a hard-hitting book, for all its lyrical nature. Life in the United States is nothing if not challenging. This is seen most clearly in the descriptions of workplaces. Rose's long hours hunched up in the chemical-filled nail salon are body-destroying. "Because I am your son," Little Dog tells her, "what I know of work I know equally of loss." And yet, despite the noxious fumes and the cramped environment, and the permanently self-effacing attitude towards clients that ensures the commonest word in the salon is "sorry", there is a social warmth. People try to escape, but often end up going back: "A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones -- with or without citizenship -- aching, toxic, and underpaid." Along with a group of undocumented Latinos, Little Dog works illegally on the tobacco farm (he's under age, and therefore paid under the table, but at a rate above minimum wage). It's rough and dangerous labour.

In the context of the swish writing conferences Vuong now attends, Jia Tolentino notes, his life story seems quite remarkable. "But, while Vuong himself is exceptional, much of his experience is not unusual. 'I always insist with a little mischievousness that I’m writing something very normal, very common,' Vuong has said. 'In fact, perhaps the middle class story is the exotic, is the rare, privileged gem that very few people get to experience.' The world’s refugee population is at its highest on record: sixty-eight million people, one per cent of the global population, have been forcibly displaced. Toward the end of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong evokes a vision of comfort and stability that feels as distant as a fairy tale. Little Dog has just buried his grandmother, and he’s thinking about his mother’s belief in reincarnation -- about a fantastical existence that would allow her, one day, to read his words. 'Maybe you’ll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again,' Vuong writes, 'and you’ll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. Maybe 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 war is always looming in the background. Little Dog cannot remember it personally, but his intimate association with those marked by its trauma ensures he inherits their memories as postmemory. "When does a war end?" wonders Little Dog. "When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?"

His present experiences are infused with a borrowed past: "[Trevor] grabbed the WWII army helmet off the floor and put it back on, the one he was wearing the day I met him. I keep seeing that helmet -- but this can’t be right. This boy, impossibly American and alive in the image of a dead soldier. It’s too neat, so clean a symbol I must have made it up. And even now, in all the pictures I looked through, I can’t find him wearing it. Yet here it is, tilted to hide Trevor’s eyes, making him seem anonymous and easy to look at."



Despite this inherited angst, Little Dog refuses to be cowed: "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 through the fruit, failed to spoil it."

Beauty is the banner Vuong sails under. He says in an interview: "I dare to call poor black and brown and yellow bodies gorgeous. It felt like, here's my chance to say it out the gate. The first sentence in the book is the title and I want to start with beauty, because that's a given to me. That's a fact. These people are beautiful and I want to start there and then show the world how they are beautiful." Min Hyoung Song captures this very aptly: "The novel asks readers to pay attention to what they might otherwise turn away from -- the experiences of war-related trauma transmitted over several generations, the difficulty of being a nonwhite refugee in the United States, the despair brought on by poverty..., and the need to assert a queer sexuality in a punishing heteronormative culture. The people caught up in such struggles are rarely considered beautiful, and certainly rarely, if ever, an inspiration for replication, but Little Dog is special in his insistence that they are beautiful."

The beautiful vulnerability of sentient life -- I guess that's the theme that underlines the whole book, and the last word on the subject should go to Little Dog: "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... To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted."