Ocean Vuong’s Life

Sentences
In his début novel, the poet tells a story of surviving the
violence of America.

By Jia Tolentino
5:00 A.M.
“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is an immigrant novel and a work of
autofiction and a letter to the narrator’s mother.
Illustration by Angelica Alzona
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), 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.”
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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.”
“After spending all day out there, I’m so calmed by a limited color palette
and some simple, clean lines.”

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.”
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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.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the June 10 &

17, 2019, issue, with the headline “Fireproof.”
 Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her first
book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,” will be published
in August.

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