On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong and the Ephemeral Quality of a Visceral Life

 This is a book – something the author calls a novel.  But it is also poetry, a memoir, and a letter to a mother who cannot read – indeed, a mother who cannot speak English.  It is a work of art – and a tour de force by a kid who has been beaten and bullied – who is the product of a war he never knew but that lives on in him none the less.  And it is the product of a relationship with Ben Lerner – a poet, novelist, memoirist and teacher, supporter and promoter of a stunningly honest style of writing that transcends memory to become a statement – of oneself as the product of one’s history, but also of oneself as one sees himself, and as he is seen through the eyes of another – in this case, the mother to whom he is telling things that we would never tell our mothers -  but that he must tell her – and cannot, because she does not have the words to understand them.  Yet, I think it is important that he see himself through her eyes – her eyes that have seen so much that they can stand to see him in his most raw and vulnerable state, but also to see beyond what he has been through – to see who he has become, and to realize with him that they, despite the flimsy foundation they have been afforded, have built a table – a place where they can eat – together – and know each other – on a deep and visceral level because they have lived within each other’s skin.

 

So, this book is not something that I can write cogently – or certainly not encyclopedically - about.  It is, I think, intentionally confusing as it skips between times and places, lingering in one when you think you have returned to the other.  It becomes taken with itself (or Vuong becomes taken with himself - his virtuosity with language is a slap down to all those who have slapped him down in the past he is narrating) and the beauty of the language interferes with the story – or is it the other way around – this brutal story interferes with the beauty of the poetry? 

 

I guess I ought to define my terms if we are going to have a solid place from which to appreciate this work.  Poetry is, for the sake of this post, the language of dreams.  It is the language of symbols that mean multiple things – it is the visual turned into the linguistic – it is a song that can be sung many times because it will reveal new meanings each time it is sung.  It is a narrative that is held together by the survival of the author, something that we are only sure will happen because we continue to hear his voice in our ear – indeed, he needs to reassure himself on a regular basis that he is there, that he hasn’t been destroyed in this moment or that, that his heart is still beating and that his words are still potent.

 

Ocean Vuong – whose given name was Beach, but this was pronounced by his Vietnamese mother Bitch, so he changed it to Ocean; in the novel his alter ego's given name is Leader of Vietnam, but we never hear the Vietnamese pronunciation of that because he goes by the name his grandmother gave him – Little Dog.  This is the name that is given to the runt of the litter, so that the runt is not stolen by roaming evil spirits.  “To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it will be left untouched- and alive.  A name, thin as air, can be a shield.  A Little Dog shield.”

 

So I worry for Little Dog.  This is a big book - even though it is short.  As big and certainly more beautiful than the pink Schwinn Little Dog learned to ride only inside after it got the paint scratched off it by bullies who said it was a sissy color.  How was his mother to know that pink was a sissy color?  Is pink a sissy color in Vietnam?  Is my own Reluctant Son lucky that his mother and father could send him to a Hippie school where he would not be bullied because pink was his favorite color?   Was the reluctant son unlucky because he was bullied not for the pink colors of his gloves and scarf, but because he was a good kid who was loving and kind and could, therefore, be used by others?

 

Ocean has opened his heart to us in this book.  And we see how he has been brutally treated by everyone who has loved him.  He is able to see the love through the brutality.  Indeed, he is able to separate himself from those who brutalize him and to see their pain while experiencing his own.  And he can feel superior to those who have more power over him – and this gives him a special power – his own super power.  It allows him to connect with those who are themselves brutalized – to find a safe space within the blows that they rain down on him – and to love them – and, I think just as importantly, to feel loved by them.

 

So I find myself thinking about Ben Lerner – the author who is pioneering this form of novelized memoir, though he is far from inventing it.  But Ben taught Ocean.  And Ocean – whom I have come to be fond of here – exposes all of his complicated identities in this book.  He lets us know that he is gay and Vietnamese and the grandson of an unknown G.I. who had sex with his grandmother when she was a comfort woman.  More intimately, he lets us know just how hungry he is for love – so hungry that he will endure a great deal. 

 

Were I his therapist, I think I would trust myself to help him appreciate this, and therefore to be curious with him about he could protect himself in his loving.  But I fear that others, hearing this naked exposure, might not be so careful.  I have to trust that Ben, and the readers of this volume will learn from it what it means to be, as he says, briefly gorgeous – and to appreciate his beauty without exploiting him.  But I think more importantly, I have to trust that this man’s resiliency is such that he will not be destroyed in the way that I imagine him to be by exposing himself so openly.

 

Since writing this far in this post, I have finished The Topeka School, and I think now, more clearly, that the more powerful of these two writers – Ben and Ocean – is certainly Ben.  He has resources that Ocean does not.  But it is clear to me that he is not as strong a person as Ocean.  Ben’s power is brittle and there largely by dint of social class but also by virtue of, as is case for Ocean, command of the language.  But language, for Ben, is a tool – it is a weapon.  It is used to keep him safe.  For Ocean, language is a means of connecting – this book is a letter to his mother – a mother who will never read it.  So we, his readers, become his mother.

 

Both authors talk quite intimately about their mothers – as intimately, in many ways, as they talk about themselves.  I am not able to be anything close to an objective observer because Ben’s mother is someone I know, not closely, but I have worked with her and been a part of her world.  Ocean’s mother could not be more foreign to me.  She beats her child.  She is impoverished.  Her schooling ended in the second grade when her village was destroyed by the US Army.  She doesn’t speak English – except to say “Sorry” to her customers as she cares for them, and she does understand enough of what they say to empathize with their losses.  But I don’t feel sorry for her in the way that I feel for Ben’s mother.  Ben’s exposure of his mother has an edge of malice.  Despite all the complications of the relationship between Ocean/Little Dog and his mother, there is a deep sense of caring for her – of understanding her and the world she lives in.  And a need to have her understand him.  Ben needs his mother to understand him, but he doesn’t seem to know that.  Ocean/Little Dog does know that he needs his mother's understanding, and he helps us to realize that the strength of knowing the other is not to have power over them, but to realize who it is that you are in relation to the other – and to realize who it is that they are and just how important it is that they are to you.  Ben and his alter Ego Adam can inhabit his father - write in his voice, but must hear from his mother.  Ocean/Little Dog can write to his mother - can create her in the ways that he needs her to be.  I think this allows him to more fully realize himself.

 

   My post on Ben Lerner's The Topeka School can be accessed here.

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