Occupying my thoughts for several years are two basic ideas. One is that all beings are equal because when we are born we have the equal right to exist on this earth.
Two is that every creature has an innate urge to survive (conatus) whether it’s the moth that turns black because pollution has blackened the trees he clings to, or flowers with red flowers to attract bees to carry their pollen, or people fleeing violence and poverty to look for a better life for themselves and their children.
Many works of fiction and non-fiction recently tell us of Jews in Europe in WWII doing all things possible to preserve themselves, their children, their genetic heritage. Works of Asian writers tell us how so many of their people deal with the violence of war in their homelands.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is about survival and identity. In this specific case, it is about a mother, daughter, and grandson who fled from Viet Nam to America in 1988, but it could have been about anyone in unbearable circumstances who is willing to sacrifice the only life they’ve known to hope they and their children can survive and perhaps have better lives. They are willing, as the grandmother did, to prostitute themselves to save themselves and their families.
The narrator, Little Dog, is given that name by Lan, his grandmother, to protect him. Their culture gave their youngest children names of despised things so others would not hurt them, that others would overlook them. Little Dog says that “to live is a matter of time, of timing” and I must add “place.” We all arrive on earth at a time and place with a set of random genetic beads that significantly determine our lives. We have the equal right to be here but because of the time, place and individual genetic makeup, we are all different.
Recently in a New York Times article (March 17, 2020) on the James family heritage, they cite the psychologist William James’ thoughts on what he called “‘pluristic philosophy’—the idea that individuality and particularity should be respected almost at all costs…. The only thing common, actually universal, James contended is that each of us is uniquely and meaningfully different, that we find significance in our own particular ways.”
He says we have an “ancestral blindness” that prevents us from recognizing the worth of other lives so different from our own.
The difficulty many readers have with these works about the horrific web of world events these people are caught in is that we cannot relate fully to their experience. As Little Dog says, “war does not live forever with elites, but does live forever with its victims.”
Little Dog cites a number of animals as metaphors for existences: the mounted deer that horrifies his mother because to her it means that death she has lived with never dies; the monarch butterfly who migrates every year through generations and sometimes because of cold loses a generation; the buffalo who follow each other over a cliff; the calf valued for his tenderness is not allowed to live to maturity; the monkey sacrificed so that men’s potency might be maintained for survival of their genes; the hummingbird, like the bee, carries pollen to propagate species and must move its wings so rapidly just to stay in place.
These examples of nature apply to humans who procreate, create, tell stories to go on, and also fail to go on, like Trevor and others in the Opiod era who follow others off the cliff. To cite again the James family, they believed it is the resistance we bring to our hardships that is the measure of our worth, our character. And that, too, is what Little Dog shows the reader by his will to survive.
Little Dog, his mother, his grandmother try to hold their place in line by constantly apologizing, saying, “sorry.” Sorry is a way of saying, I have to survive. For Little Dog it became his Hello. Ocean Vuong saw that first generation immigrants wanted to be invisible, but second generation wanted to be seen, to be heard. "Sorry" kept Little Dog’s mother subservient and under the radar: Little Dog wanted to be recognized.
In one scene Little Dog, his mother, Rose, and grandmother drive to a house where Rose thinks her sister Mia is. She has forgotten with her PTSD that Mia had moved to Florida five years before. But as they were leaving, a young boy comes out of the house with a toy gun which he points at Little Dog. Little Dog writes, “I look him dead in the eyes and do what you do. I refuse to die.”
Human beings like Rose, Lan and Little Dog do things to make a mark in their world, to raise their hand to say, “I was here.” They have children, they, like Lan, tell stories, they paint on walls, on canvas, they write songs, they sing songs, they turn pots, the chisel sculptures, they press their hands into clay, they pass on recipes, they teach younger generations about their history.
Little Dog leaves his mark with his writing. Ocean Vuong writes in a poem “by pressing/this pen to paper I was touching us/ back from extinction.” When Little Dog began writing he was hesitant, uncertain because he doesn’t know who he is. He is mixed race in a country that isn’t his, with a mother and grandmother whose lives are damaged by war and violence, and whose language is not theirs. As he writes he begins to know himself, his color, his sexuality, genetic makeup, his will to live, his purpose. “To be or not be. That is the question.” But Little Dog knows it is “A question, yes, but not a choice.” Each of us must adapt our thinking about our lives by learning who we are, our identity. Little Dog, as a writer, sees lives as commas with more to come in the future. He also knows that some, like Trevor, reached a period. Little Dog says, “Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period.”
The title of the book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, means a couple of things. One, it refers to the brief time we exist on earth in the history of time, and two, it refers to times in Little Dog’s life he has felt worthy of love, of generosity. When a little boy in his class offered him a pizza bagel, he felt the generosity given to him. He felt gorgeous because someone thought he was worthy of a gift. When Trevor loved him, he “remembered it all because how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful?” It was gorgeous to have family, even though they were broken by language and experience, their touching was how they connected and he felt loved. He had thought his family was born of wars, but he knows now “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.”
Little Dog writes, “We try to preserve life even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We do these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.”
Memory is central to the novel. In fact, the structure of the book is built from memories. It is not written in chronological order but in flashes of memory, jumping from one memory to another. Memory is a second chance and putting down memories in a letter to his mother who can’t read is Little Dog’s way of making sense of his life. He hopes that his mother will, in her next life, be literate and read their story.
It is this human being, Little Dog, exploring so truthfully the depths of his humanness in all its pain and joy that leaves such a lasting imprint on his readers’ minds.
While Little Dog might think that the time and place of our birth and our genetic makeup can be determinative, he thinks he does not have to be a victim of war, violence or other damage from the past. He does not need to be a victim of this roll of the dice.
Little Dog writes: “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.”
Through all the war, the violence, the fruit has not been spoiled.
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