A review by whatpageareyouon
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

3.0

I personally feel as though I can’t rate/review this book fairly. So many of my own experiences being Asian American are (on the verge of uncanny) mirrored here. Whether remembering teaching my own mother English, growing to start most sentences with an apology because of watching my mother do the same to the cashier when I’d go grocery shopping with her (and sense the smallest change in her accent getting sharper when she does it) and getting constant prolonged glares from strangers at the mall while my white, not by blood, grandparents would take me and my siblings Christmas shopping, it was all too familiar. It’s because of this familiarity that I just don’t know what else could have really set this character we’re given apart from my own life, which I perceive as highly ordinary. I don’t know if Vuong was writing for me—not that any writer has to write for any specific audience—but the first half of this book felt like an introduction to the character vs any sense of exploration, which, if at all, I think is most emphasized in the second half. Even still, somehow the writing feels suffocated and stifled despite the access for confessional and intimate prose with the epistolary format the novel takes. Where the second half does, to me, get more specific with detail regarding the beginning and end of a romantic relationship, it does finally feel like a turning point where Vuong feels confident enough to trust his own assessment of (what I can only assume) his experiences translated into fiction. I don’t know why Vuong wouldn’t approach this project through memoir instead, which I think would get rid of this cluttery wordiness and excess explaining presented in the novel, especially to leave more room to find lines like this in the second half:

“Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?”

And if that isn’t one of the most encapsulating feelings of being Asian American then I don’t know what is.