San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Immigrant wrestles with his painful past
In a moving scene in Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a grade-schooler, armed with a pair of tweezers, helps his grandmother remove some unwanted gray hairs. “For this work,” he recalls, “I was paid in stories.” Her repertoire, which includes mythological tales about ghosts and grievous real-life memories of the Vietnam War, helps shape his understanding of the world. In time, Little Dog, as he’s known, becomes a talented writer.
Vuong’s first novel takes the form of a letter that Little Dog, now in his late 20s, writes to his mother. Determined to sort through his painful past, he pens a harrowing account of a youth shaped by violence, homophobia and loss.
An epistolary novel has a tricky framework, but for Vuong, an award-winning poet, it’s a platform for extraordinary imagery, carefully parsed relationships and intense prose. He’s a writer with the patience and skill to develop a cast of complex characters, one who knows how to take on timely themes — the opioid crisis, anti-immigrant bigotry — in a way that never feels forced.
Little Dog is a toddler when he, his mother Rose and grandmother Lan leave Vietnam and settle in Hartford, Conn., in 1990. His earliest memories are not idyllic. “The first time you hit me, I must have been four,” he writes to Rose. Later, after more beatings, he learns that people who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder “are more likely to hit their children.” This helps him understand his mother’s rage: “As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again.”
The family scrapes by on Rose’s earnings from long shifts at factories and nail salons. They go to church soup kitchens and buy used blankets. On the bus to school, Little Dog is bullied because he’s small and Asian. “Don’t draw attention to yourself,” his mother says when he leaves the apartment. “You’re already Vietnamese.” In his teens, around the time he realizes he’s gay, their front door is spray-painted with vile homophobic graffiti.
His sexual awakening, depicted in poignant detail, is one of the novel’s major story lines. At a tobacco farm where he lands a summer job, Little Dog, a high school freshman, meets Trevor, an impulsive junior. They spend humid August nights exploring one another’s bodies, joyriding in pickup trucks and experimenting with drugs. Though they eventually grow apart, Little Dog is no less heartbroken when he learns of Trevor’s opioid-fueled descent.
With its graphic eroticism and illicit substances, Little Dog’s letter is not the kind of correspondence most people would exchange with their mothers. But he’s comfortable covering such risqué territory because he knows that she can’t read English. In this way, the novel’s overarching structure is an ingenious representation of our failure — as members of families and communities, as fellow citizens — to understand one another.
Though “On Earth” is seldom cheerful — Little Dog’s family will also be touched by mental illness and cancer — there are moments of hope. One of these stems from his unusual moniker. His grandmother, he explains, grew up in a village where “the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout.” To give a child such a name is to ward off the “evil spirits” that covet “healthy, beautiful children.” By calling him Little Dog, Lan and Rose are protecting him: “A name, thin as air, can also be a shield.”
Vuong, who like his protagonist was born in Vietnam and grew up in Hartford, has written a distinctive, intimate novel that is also a reckoning with the Vietnam War’s long shadow. His prose is direct and potent; sometimes, it has the elegance of an ancient proverb: “You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were a god, you’d know it’s a flood.” He’s darkly funny — and every so often, disappointingly bland. “The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet,” he writes, “and therefore ready to run.” This is mordant, clever. Alas, the next sentence — “The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones”— is bumpersticker glib.
Given his success as a poet —“Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” his 2016 collection, won several major awards — it’s unsurprising that Vuong’s debut novel is full of rich images. To Little Dog, his grandmother’s footprints resemble “red-brown quotation marks.” His mother’s bare shoulder is as “white as a halved apple.” When the sun strikes summer foliage, “everything ambers, as if we’re in a snowglobe filled with tea.”
Late in the book, reflecting on all that he’s shared, Little Dog notes that his long letter is less a story than “a shipwreck — the pieces floating, finally legible.” It’s true — his narrative is composed of distressing, long-submerged incidents that are hoisted to the surface for examination; there’s a lot of pain here. But there’s beauty too, and humor and perceptiveness. Vuong is a skillful, daring writer, and his first novel is a powerful one.