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

This book needs you to take your time. Although the novel appears slim it is quite dense in terms of the content and Vuong’s prose. Some chapters read more like short stories and long form poetry than a linear account. The book has moments of absolute hopelessness, you’re shattered by Little Dog’s accounts of growing up an Asian immigrant in America, gay and poor. His one-sided and ill-fated relationship with Trevor makes me cautious (and sad) to say he is Little Dog's 'first love'. So much of their relationship is marred by Trevor's homophobia and recklessness.

I wish less time was spent on that relationship and more weight was given to the other significant relationships in his life and the milestones he achieves in his adulthood.

But there’s beauty in it too - a nod to the book’s title. Vuong/ Little Dog is able to hold so much compassion for people, he chooses to see them in their gorgeousness - irrespective of the brevity of that moment. Long after the novel is over you’ll keep coming back to certain phrases, marvelling at how stunning and lyrical Vuong’s writing is.

One of my favourite passages from the book reads:
“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”

Content Warnings

claudiamacpherson's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

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archaicrobin's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

This is without a doubt one of the most beautiful books I have ever read (or technically listened to). Ocean Vuoung writes beautifully and completely destroyed me at the same time.

Written as a letter to his illiterate mother who fled Vietnam during the war, Little Dog shares his struggles growing up as a gay Vietnamese man in America at a time where tolerance was almost non-existent. You hear about his mother’s story of survival, along with that of his grandmother’s. You hear about the horrific things his family has endured and that he has endured at the hands of his family. So much emotion is in this book, it completely destroyed me.

I highly recommend this novel and if you can, get the audiobook so you can hear Ocean’s narration of it! This is one I’ll be thinking about for awhile….

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josie9's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

4.75

Absolutely speechless, Vuong’s writing is truely ingenious, authentic and so freaking devastating

Content Warnings

erikalv97's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

5.0

This book is beautifully written, the story is enthralling, I could hardly put the book down.

I loved the writer’s style, the constant change of tenses, narration and the really thorough descriptions.

The story itself is hard hitting, I cried several times (please check the cw!!!!)

Content Warnings

koreanlinda's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

3.5

If you can fill a book with sorrow, this would be it. There are glimpses of joy here and there, but they only exist to resist against and survive from the deep sorrow that pulls in everyone around. Sorrow takes its root in the novel’s melodramatic pessimism: we are all trapped in our lives, and living is our constant attempt at escaping it. Who am I to judge though? If I lived the life of Little Dog, or Ocean Vuong, I might have thought the same.

I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey. (p.4)

All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there,… But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough. (p.216)

This book fails at being a novel in a traditional sense. It is more of pieces of experiences, observations, and contemplation written most poetically and strewn together into one binding. It has its minimal structure in loosely chronological order: three parts of Little Dog’s life in childhood, adolescence, and after college. If you look for a clear storyline, you quickly get lost. It’s more effective to absorb each chapter as a lump of colors, senses, and emotions.

I am a daughter of a working-class immigrant family. What I witness in people’s lives in this fictional Hartford, CT easily disqualifies my family of that title. These people are not working-poor, they are working-dirt-poor. When we just landed in the farthest corner of Staten Island (also the farthest corner of NYC), my family lived in a side door of a multi-family house with a low ceiling and two small windows. Yet we were never starved. We were not subjected to physical violence by others or each other. We were never exposed to substance abuse or fallen into never-ending drinking.

Yet there are parts where I see myself in Little Dog’s life. I suffered from my mother’s beating when I was young, and her psychological abuse lasted a lot longer. She got a job at a nail salon, which used to be dominated by all those women new from Korea, and now taken over by those from Vietnam.

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

My mother often cried and drank soju after work while spitting out stories from the salon. I wanted to tell her to quit her job, but I couldn’t. What else could she do? While spending most of her waking hours there, my mother formed her ideas of people living in the United States: poor Asians and Latinas were allies; well-off Whites had everything that they didn’t earn. I completely understood her initial distrust in my White partner when he tried to enter our family.

A side note to readers who get triggered by the content of animal abuse: skip pages 38-39, 41, 43-44. There is also a talk about veal calves trapped in cages on p.216. It is short but renders an inaccurate analogy of comparing the limited freedom of the three main characters to that of the calves. The lives of Trevor, Lan, and Rose are indeed limited by their environment beyond their control, but the range of their free will is significantly bigger than that of a veal calf. Also, the veal calves never become a perpetrator of violence themselves, unlike humans.

Review by Linda (she/they) in Jan. 2022
Twitter @KoreanLindaPark
Letter writer at DefinitelyNotOkay.com

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