For many immigrants, the best-case scenario is that their children will never really understand them. Think of a woman from Vietnam, the daughter of a farm girl and a nameless G.I., who moves from a refugee camp in the Philippines to public housing in Connecticut. There she raises a son, who was born on a rice farm but grows up in the back rooms of Hartford nail salons, and becomes not just the first person in the family to attend school past the sixth grade but a poet who wins prizes and is hailed in major magazines. The mother cannot speak English, or read any language; the more complex and ambitious the son’s work becomes, the greater the gulf between his writing in English and her basic Vietnamese—and the more impossible it is for her to understand him, in return.
The poet is Ocean Vuong. He is thirty years old, and teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His début collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” was published in 2016, and made him just the second poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize for a first book. At the center of his work is the paradox of his situation: the grief and the freedom that accrue simultaneously as he writes his way toward and away from his forebears. In one poem, Vuong writes, “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.” In another, the lyrics of “White Christmas”—the playing of which, on Armed Forces Radio, signalled the final military evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese refugees from Saigon—are intercut with images of death, abandonment, a sky “shredded / with gunfire,” helicopters “lifting the living just out of reach.”
Vuong couldn’t speak English when he started school in Hartford, and couldn’t read at grade level until age eleven. But as he began to write poetry, in childhood, he wrenched himself into the existence that would separate him from his family even as he honored them. By “pressing / this pen to paper, I was touching us / back from extinction,” he writes. Language, for him, would be a conduit rather than an impediment. It would allow him to make visible the memory of his mother breaking a pencil as she wrote “a b c” over and over, trying to teach herself the alphabet, the “b bursting its belly / as dark dust blows / through a blue-lined sky,” nail-salon chemicals emanating from the sweat that seeps through her pink “I ♥ NY” T-shirt. Vuong uses language to conjure wholeness from a situation that language has already broken, and will continue to break; loss and survival are always twinned. In “Threshold,” which opens the collection, he writes, “I didn’t know the cost / of entering a song—was to lose / your way back. / So I entered. So I lost. / I lost it all with my eyes / wide open.”
Many of the poems concern Vuong’s father, or an idea of him—he was absent for much of Vuong’s upbringing. In “Daily Bread,” Vuong imagines his father, “all famine / & fissure,” waking in a windowless room, possibly a jail cell, to the delusion that his son is present. “Put yor hans on mai showduh, / he will say to the cigarette smoke swirling / into the ghost of a boy,” Vuong writes. “Now flap. Yeah, lye dat, baby. / lap lye yu waving gootbai. See? / I telling yu . . . I telling yu. Yor daddy? / He fly.”
Vuong is conscious that, without his work, the story of his family would seem to exist mostly in the form of uninterpreted bodies moving from one place to the next. Several of the poems position animals as shadow selves. The poet was “not born / but crawled, headfirst— / into the hunger of dogs.” In “Threshold,” his father, mid-shower, listens for Vuong’s “clutched breath” behind the bathroom door that separates them, a “dark colt paused in downpour.” There is a sexual encounter with a boy: “My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling.” He describes walking up to a man lighting a cigarette on the stoop of a brownstone on a cold and lonely Thanksgiving in Brooklyn. “I am ready to be every animal / you leave behind,” he writes.
Vuong has now published a novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (Penguin Press), featuring a narrator whose circumstances closely resemble, and are often indistinguishable from, his own. (A version of the first chapter was published, two years ago, as memoir, by this magazine.) The narrator’s parents, following a rural Vietnamese tradition of naming a child for something so worthless that the evil spirits might pass over the house and spare him, call him Little Dog. Little Dog grows up in Hartford with his traumatized mother and a schizophrenic grandmother. At fourteen, he takes a job picking tobacco on a farm outside Hartford, and begins a fraught relationship with a white boy named Trevor, the grandson of the farm’s owner. The structural hallmarks of Vuong’s poetry—his skill with elision, juxtaposition, and sequencing—shape the novel, too, and they work on overlapping scales: passages are organized by recurring phrases, as are the chapters, which build momentum as a poetry collection does, line by line. Most of the novel centers on Little Dog’s childhood and adolescence, but Vuong roams in non-chronological circles through a wide field of intensified memory. The narrative occasionally extends backward, to visions of Little Dog’s mother and grandmother in Vietnam, before he was born, and it briefly reaches forward, in a few passages that signal that Little Dog has become a writer.
“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is both an immigrant novel and a work of autofiction; it is also an epistolary novel, written, loosely, as a letter to the narrator’s mother, which she will never read. Success as a writer is the mostly unspoken end point of Little Dog’s story: readers who know Vuong’s biography will assume it, and those who don’t will infer it from the strength of the book’s language. That tacit destination gives the narrative an invisible current, and embeds conflict in every word. “Dear Ma,” Little Dog begins, “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.”
Little Dog’s father makes brief appearances in the book—in one scene, he waves a bloody twenty-dollar bill in the air, attempting to bribe the Hartford cops who have come to the house to stop him from beating his wife—but Little Dog’s mother, whose American name is Rose, is the heart of the novel. In its first chapter, she hunches, at the age of forty-six, over Walmart coloring books, which have become her new obsession. She asks Little Dog if he’s ever imagined himself inside a scene he’s created, and Little Dog thinks, “How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing?” This soft, sad memory is interwoven with another recollection, from earlier in Little Dog’s life: Rose throwing a box of Legos at his head, drawing blood, then taking him to McDonald’s in compensation. Abuse is Rose’s inheritance, bequeathed to her son half in helplessness and half in broken devotion. Throughout the book, vignettes of his mistreatment light up and go out swiftly, like matches. There’s a knife pulled in the kitchen on a black summer night; there’s a jug of milk “bursting on my shoulder bone, then a steady white rain on the kitchen tiles.”
As a child in Hartford, Little Dog accompanies his mother and grandmother to the grocery store, where they try to buy oxtail without knowing the word for it. The women moo and shake their butts, making a joke of themselves for the butchers; they leave with an armful of Wonder Bread and mayonnaise that Rose has mistaken for butter. “That night I promised myself I’d never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you,” Vuong writes. When he’s older, Little Dog calls a factory manager and asks him to cut his mother’s hours, because she has been falling asleep in the bathtub from exhaustion, and he is worried she will drown. He calls the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and orders her bras. He will not grow up to work in a nail salon, asthmatic from the toluene and formaldehyde fumes. He will not crouch around an electric burner and a cauldron of pho in the back room, his life contained in this “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.”
Like Vuong’s poetry, the novel is full of animal imagery. Often, the creatures are fleeing or transforming. In the first chapter, monarch butterflies migrate south, but only “their children return; only the future revisits the past.” Little Dog imagines the monarchs fleeing “not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam,” travelling for thousands of miles until “you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.” The word “fireproof” lights up a constellation of links between the butterflies and Little Dog’s mother, who treats herself to a yellow-tag sale at Goodwill, and holds up a white dress to show her son, asking if the fabric will be safe for her to wear. In another sequence, a white classmate corners Little Dog on the school bus, saying, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” “He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers,” Vuong writes. Other boys crowd around, “sensing entertainment,” the scent of “lavender and lilac” rising from the fabric softener in their clothes. The boys slap Little Dog, and the instigator barks, “Say my name then. Like your mom did last night.” The line snaps the reader back two pages, to the image of Little Dog’s grandmother walking the street, looking for soldiers, in the years when “it was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive.” Afterward, Little Dog sits alone, kicking his light-up sneakers on the floor—“the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere”—to distract himself from the pain. He gets home, and his mother slaps him, too, then hugs him, and tells him that he has to “step up or they’ll keep going,” that he must use his “bellyful of English.” Soon she’s forcing him to drink milk every day, pouring a “thick white braid” of it into his glass. Little Dog thinks, “I’m filling myself with light.”
Little Dog’s relationship with his mother is his life’s codex: everything that structures his world—work, gratitude, cruelty, poverty, history—is translated through her. When Trevor notices him, at the farm, Little Dog is shocked to have been seen; Rose taught him to protect himself by staying invisible. Trevor is addicted to OxyContin, which was prescribed to him after a dirt-bike accident. He wears fentanyl patches and John Deere hats; he laces his joints with cocaine and crashes his father’s pickup truck. When Little Dog begins submitting to Trevor’s brusque, wordless sexual demands, he thinks, “Violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love.” Now he is “being fucked up, at last, by choice.” With Trevor, Little Dog repeats and transfigures his submission to his mother’s blows. “What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling?” Little Dog asks. “No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop.” But whatever freedom he finds is shadowed by the reflexes he learned from his mother. The first time Little Dog and Trevor have anal sex, it gets messy. “Trevor being who he was, raised in the fabric and muscle of American masculinity, I feared for what would come,” Vuong writes. And then: “I rose to my knees, half covered my face, bracing.”
In order to survive, Little Dog has to receive and reject another kind of violence, too: he must see his mother through the American eyes that scan her for weakness and incompetence and, at best, disregard her, the way that evil spirits might ignore a child named for a little dog. There is a staggering tenderness in the way that Little Dog holds all of this within himself, absorbing it and refusing to pass it on. Reading “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” can feel like watching an act of endurance art, or a slow, strange piece of magic in which bones become sonatas, to borrow one of Vuong’s metaphors. Rose hurts Little Dog, and distances herself from him, in order to toughen him up for his new country. (“Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war,” Vuong writes.) As an immigrant child tasked with making something of himself, Little Dog might have done the same to her. When he’s young, and attending a friend’s birthday party, his grandmother, “her face the shade of raw ground beef from a single Heineken,” sings a folk song about corpses. Little Dog denies himself the practice that has been modelled all around him—he will not violate this fragility in the hopes of making it disappear.
Little Dog finishes high school. He leaves Hartford, and Trevor, to go to college in New York City. He studies literature. His hands write poems—unlike his mother’s hands, damaged by chemicals in the salon, they do not resemble “two partially scaled fish.” But images from his mother’s and grandmother’s lives circle back. In an extended scene, Little Dog’s grandmother stands with Rose in her arms at a checkpoint manned by American soldiers. Her “tongue made obsolete by gunfire,” she begs to be allowed back into her village. “ ‘Yoo Et Aye numbuh won,’ ” she says, feebly, “urine still dripping down her ankles.” When Rose is five, a napalm bomb destroys her school, and her education ends. Little Dog’s story commutes his family’s sentence: it turns his life into words that might act as the culmination of all this cruelty, that might allow his grandmother and his mother to be openly broken—to be loved, as so few people are in this country, because they have been weakened, because they were weak.
Much of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is about what it means to become an American. “What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?” Little Dog asks, and then, later, “What is a country but a life sentence?” Like the Beijing-born novelist Yiyun Li, Vuong has a fondness for the sort of wordplay that involves noticing odd accidents in the language that he had to consciously learn. (Li’s most recent novel, “Where Reasons End,” an imagined dialogue between a mother and a son who had died by suicide, was also written as a letter to a loved one who would never read it.) “Say amen. Say amend,” Vuong writes, in “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.” While Little Dog is in college, Trevor dies from an overdose. Little Dog looks at Trevor’s Facebook page, where Trevor’s father has written, “I’m broken in two,” and he thinks, “Now I’m broken into.” Lines like these risk preciousness, but Vuong’s earnestness is overpowering. “I know,” he writes elsewhere in the book. “It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.”
The vernacular of destruction is visible in everything American that touches Little Dog. Trevor’s eyes, which he loves, are “grey irises smattered with bits of brown and ember so that, looking at them, you could almost see, right behind you, something burning under an overcast sky.” At another moment in the book, Little Dog observes, “The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.” In a chapter made of short, fragmentary paragraphs that juxtapose Trevor’s death and Little Dog’s new life as a writer, the type who is asked to speak at conferences, Little Dog remembers a man at a party telling him, “Good for you, man, you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.” He thinks of other writers: “They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.” The “you” of this chapter alternately refers to Little Dog and to his mother, and perhaps to Vuong himself—all three begin to blur and converge.
In the context of those conferences, Vuong’s story seems extraordinary. 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.” ♦
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the publisher of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.”
