Reviews with content warning for Colonisation - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is brief and gorgeous, full of pain and violence and love, like a human life. Told almost in a series of vignettes, memories pieced together with reflection, the story Little Dog gives us is presented out of chronological order but with perfect resonance. It’s a love letter to his deeply flawed mother and his equally deeply flawed first boyfriend, Trevor,

neither of whom will ever read it because the former is illiterate & never became totally fluent in English and the latter because he is dead

, filled with the pain inflicted on him, but equally with the tenderness of flawed, beautiful people doing their best to escape what cages them, what hunts them.

Little Dog narrates the war in Vietnam that shaped his family, that he once thought birthed them, before he realized that they were born of beauty.

He shows images of his grandmother, Lan, in war-torn Vietnam, facing soldiers with guns while holding the infant Rose--his mother--in a bundle, their lives spared, probably, because Rose was more white than yellow, her father an American soldier. We glimpse Rose and Paul falling in love--Paul, the man who chose to be Rose's father and Little Dog's grandfather, though Lan, forced to work as a prostitute to survive during the war, was already pregnant when they met. Little Dog's father hovers at the edges of the narrative, a man who beat his mother and was carried off in a police car, who brought his wages home in coins that made them feel rich, who took them to KFC with a coupon given to them by a cashier at Goodwill.

He shows us his childhood, filled with a mother who was overworked and whose job at the nail salon taught her to say sorry as part of her identity, part of her livelihood, lessons Little Dog carried into his own first job, working underage among illegal immigrants harvesting tobacco, and paid under the table. A childhood colored by his schizophrenic Lan, as with the night that he awoke to fireworks that she thought were an air raid, and the two of them crouched together, hiding from the enemy, but also as with the day that she spotted purple flowers across a fence separating the path from the highway, sending Little Dog over to gather them, helping him back across, creating a windowsill garden & a secret that bonded them, Lan's finger to her lips as she told Rose they found the flowers discarded by a florist, the night he came home after having penetrative sex with Trevor for the first time, wet from the river they bathed in, and Lan told him that he had been on a long journey but they wouldn't speak of it so that the pirates couldn't find him.

A childhood shaped around his mother's pain, her abuse of Little Dog, but also the two of them walking the mall with squares of chocolate that felt decadent, filling a cart at Goodwill on yellow tag day when everything was an additional 50% off, reaching across a divide to touch each other and share truths even when they cut--in the bakery, when Little Dog comes out to his mother and she tells him that he had a brother, aborted before he was born, because they could not afford to feed him.

A young adulthood of choosing his own pain, in the form of Trevor, who could not accept his own homosexuality, and who was himself broken by an abusive father, a culture who taught him to hate himself and deny his own existence as a gay man, an addiction to Oxycontin turned heroin, stemming from an ankle injury when he was just 14 years old, dying of an overdose at 22.

The narrative ends with Trevor's death and its aftermath interspersed with Lan's death and its aftermath, with Little Dog's goodbye to his first doomed love echoed by Paul's graveside goodbye via video chat to his own doomed first love, the former sundered by preventable addiction and the latter by war & the machinations of his family.

Throughout the text, Little Dog returns again and again in powerful ways to a few animal images: the monarch butterflies and their yearly migration; macaque monkeys, whose heads were broken open while they were still alive so their brains could be ingested as a cure for impotence; baby calves kept in close cages for their entire short lives so that their meat would be more tender and delicious; and buffalo, an entire herd, stampeding over a cliff, one after the other. Seeing the image on TV, Rose asks Little Dog why the buffalo do that, watching those before them fall to their deaths and doing the same thing, a question that Little Dog, in turn, poses to Trevor, who tells him that it's not a choice they make, just nature. Vuong chooses to leave us with only this answer, which is also the answer of why people repeat the same patterns, intergenerational trauma in action, friends dying by the handfuls of ODs. Googling the question after finishing the book, I find that the true answer is just as perfect for the novel: buffalo stampede when threatened and Native Americans harnessed this knowledge to kill the buffalo in droves. Like the Vietnamese immigrants in this story, like the forgotten poor of the neighborhood where Little Dog grew up--and so many identical neighborhoods (places where people don't ask "how are you?" because the responses are already known and overflowing with loss and pain and unmet needs, but instead "what's good?" because good, however small it is, can be good enough, because freedom is always relative, and calves are the most free in the short moments between their cage being opened & being led to the slaughter), like queer people, the buffalo run off the cliff because they are hunted.

Content Warnings

notartgarfunkel's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Content Warnings

miller8d's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I read this book a few months ago, so it isn’t super fresh in my mind, but my memory of it entails gorgeous poetic language, brilliantly detailed storytelling, and incredible nonfictional world-building.
Note: I vaguely pictured Edvin Ryding as Trevor.

Content Warnings