66 Time June 17, 2019
TimeOff Books
Ocean VuOng read frOm his pOeTry aT
the Los Angeles public library two years
ago. I was onstage with him as his inter-
viewer, and what struck me about Vuong
was his marvelous combination of vul-
nerability and strength. His frame is pe-
tite, his voice almost ethereal, and his
moving poems explore the pain of being
queer, a refugee, a poet and a member of a
working- class family deeply impacted by
the Vietnam War. The poems from his book Night Sky With Exit
Wounds expose raw hurt, love and joy, and in performing them,
he demonstrated the confidence required to reveal himself.
Vuong does the same in his compelling, emotional first
novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, written as a letter
from a Vietnamese- American narrator to his mother. The pro-
tagonist is known only by the nickname his grandmother has
given him, Little Dog, and bears some resemblance to Vuong
himself, or at least the Vuong portrayed in his poems. Build-
ing on the themes of Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the novel
adds a plot in which the teenage Little Dog, a perpetual out-
sider, finds love with a white boy, Trevor. The two meet work-
ing as manual laborers in the tobacco fields outside Hartford,
Conn., where drug and alcohol abuse are rampant among
poor whites. Their love is transgressive in more ways than
one: it is both queer and interracial.
Trevor suffers from an addiction to OxyContin, while Lit-
tle Dog is haunted by the Vietnam War, through the ways it
has traumatized his grandmother Lan and his abusive, con-
flicted mother, who takes out her frustrations on her son.
What both women saw in the war flashes through the pages
of the novel, as in the moment when an American soldier—a
boy—points his M-16 in Lan’s face while she holds her young
daughter. Mother and daughter know what most Vietnamese
and too few Americans know—that the war burned not only
soldiers but also civilians, including women and children.
LittLe Dog finDs soLace with Trevor, and their intensely
physical relationship brings them together, highlighting key
oppositions within the novel: death and sex, pain and plea-
sure, excrement and ecstasy, violence and love. The climax
of the novel is also the climax of their passion, a powerful de-
piction of Trevor’s penetration of Little Dog: “The feeling
brought on, not by tenderness, as from caress, but by the body
having no choice but to accommodate pain by dulling it into
an impossible, radiating pleasure.” To open oneself up to an-
other is to risk being overpowered. But in being over powered,
Little Dog finds his own strength—through possessing
Trevor, finding knowledge of himself and becoming a writer.
By daring to allow himself to be hurt, Little Dog finds, at
least for a while, that most precious of resources: love. Like-
wise, Vuong as a writer is daring. He
goes where the hurt is, creating a novel
saturated with yearning and ache. Little
Dog is turned inside out by his search
for validation, and Vuong imbues his
quest with meaning that extends be-
yond the personal. Little Dog pushes
back against those who would criticize
his writing when he says, “They will tell
you that to be political is to be merely
angry, and therefore artless, depthless,
‘raw,’ and empty. They will speak of the
political with embarrassment.”
Vuong refuses to be embarrassed. He
transforms the emotional, the visceral,
the individual into the political in an
unforgettable—indeed, gorgeous—
novel, a book that seeks to affect its
readers as profoundly as Little Dog is
affected, not only by his lover but also
by the person who brought him into
the world: “You’re a mother, Ma. You’re
also a monster,” Little Dog writes. “But
so am I—which is why I can’t turn away
from you.”Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning
author of The SympathizerFICTION
A painful search
for love
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
VUONG: TOM HINES—PENGUIN PRESS; BOOKS: KIM BUBELLO FOR TIME
△
Vuong was born in
Ho Chi Minh City
and immigrated to
the U.S. with his
family as a child