"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"

[fiefoe]

Ocean Vuong's novel is practically one long lament, and not easy to go through.

• I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But 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.
• * I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.
• The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.
  What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?
  That time at the Chinese butcher, you pointed to the roasted pig hanging from its hook. “The ribs are just like a person’s after they’re burned.” You let out a clipped chuckle
• I gasped—but knew better, that it was only a man who resembled him. Still, it upended me to see what I thought I’d never see again—the features so exact
• * Monarchs that survived the migration passed this message down to their children. The memory of family members lost from the initial winter was woven into their genes. <> When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
• You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.
• What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.
• To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once. <> I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.   
• At recess the next day, the kids would call me freak, fairy, fag. I would learn, much later, that those words were also iterations of monster.
• To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.           
• “Help me stay young, get this snow off of my life—get it all off my life.” I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong.
• I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us.
• You find a way or you don’t tell me about this ever again, you hear?” You pulled back. “You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going. You have a bellyful of English.”
• Each morning after that, we’d repeat this ritual: the milk poured with a thick white braid, I’d drink it down, gulping, making sure you could see, both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy.
• I examined the massive granite-colored mountains across the sky’s horizon. Yes, of course the plane shook. We were moving through rocks, our flight a supernatural perseverance of passage. Because to go back to that man took that kind of magic. The plane should rattle, it should nearly shatter.
• You turned to me, your face wet, pleading. “Tell them. Go ahead and tell them what we need.” I didn’t know that oxtail was called oxtail. I shook my head, shame welling inside me. The men stared, their chortling now reduced to bewildered concern. The store was closing. One of them asked again, head lowered, sincere. But we turned from them. We abandoned the oxtail, the bún bò huế. You grabbed a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of mayonnaise. None of us spoke as we checked out, our words suddenly wrong everywhere, even in our mouths.
• * But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level. <> 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. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.
• It wasn’t until I saw the mood ring that I realized you were asking me, once more, to interpret another portion of America... “I’m happy!” Lan threw her arms in the air. “I’m happy on my boat. My boat, see?” She pointed to your arms, splayed out like oars, she and I on each side. I looked down and saw it, the brown, yellowish floorboards swirling into muddy currents. I saw the weak ebb thick with grease and dead grass. We weren’t rowing, but adrift. We were clinging to a mother the size of a raft until the mother beneath us grew stiff with sleep. And we soon fell silent as the raft took us all down this great brown river called America, finally happy.
• “Seven,” her mother said through a crack in the door, “a girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest. You know this. How can you not know?” And then the door closed, but not before a hand, gnarled as wood, pressed a pair of pearl earrings into Lan’s grip. The mother’s pale face erased by the door’s swing, the lock’s click.
• Twenty-eight now, she has given birth to a girl she wraps in a piece of sky stolen from a clear day.
• thinking of another world, one where a woman holds her daughter by the side of a road, a thumbnail moon hung in the clear air. A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.
• Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing.
• she ended up as a sex worker for American GIs on R&R. She said, with barbed pride, as if she was defending herself before a jury, “I did what any mother would do, I made a way to eat. Who can judge me, huh? Who?”
• One does not “pass” in America, it seems, without English.
  “No, madam,” I said to the woman in my ESL English. “That’s my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I’m doing fine. I feel good how about you? Merry Christmas Happy New Year.” The deluge was exactly eighty percent of the language I knew at the time and I shivered in pure delight as the words flew out of me.
  You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers and sons, is considered taboo—so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus.
• The boy’s birth name, according to an ESPN profile I read a while back, was Eldrick Tont Woods. His first name a unique formulation of the E in “Earl” and ending in the K in “Kultida.” His parents, whose home in Brooklyn was often vandalized due to their interracial marriage, decided to stand at each end of their son’s name, like pillars... Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, one of the greatest golfers in the world is, like you, Ma, a direct product of the war in Vietnam.
• Paul and I are in his garden harvesting fresh basil for a pesto recipe he promised to teach me. We successfully avoid talking about the past, having brushed by it earlier that morning... We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.       
• You put both hands on my shoulder, the smoke thickening around us. “He’s not your grandfather. Okay?” <> The words entered me as if through a vein... You said that when Lan met Paul that night in the bar in Saigon, Lan was already four months pregnant. The father, the real one, was just another American john—faceless, nameless, less.
• All through his time in Vietnam, Phong was Woods’s confidant. Perhaps such strong bonds are inevitable between men who trust each other with their lives. Perhaps it was their mutual otherness that drew them close, Woods being both black and Native American, growing up in the segregated American South, and Phong, a sworn enemy to half of his countrymen in an army run, at its core, by white American generals... But to Earl Woods, his friend was known as none other than “Tiger Phong”—or simply Tiger, a nickname Woods had given him for his ferocity in battle.
• 1964: When commencing his mass bombing campaign in North Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, then chief of staff of the US Air Force, said he planned on bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Ages.” To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time. The US military would end up releasing over ten thousand tons of bombs in a country no larger than the size of California—surpassing the number of bombs deployed in all of WWII combined.
• When you were a girl in Vietnam, the neighborhood kids would take a spoon to your arms, shouting, “Get the white off her, get the white off her!” Eventually you learned to swim. 
• * “We getting out of here, huh? We gotta go far, Little Dog!” Outside, the night surges by like sideways gravity.
• There’s a story Lan would tell, of Lady Triệu, the mythical woman warrior who led an army of men and repelled the Chinese invasion of ancient Vietnam. I think of her, seeing you. How, as legend goes, armed with two swords, she’d fling her yard-long breasts over her shoulders and cut down the invaders by the dozens.
• Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it.
• Evening had turned the glass into a mirror and you couldn’t see him there, only the lines scored across your cheeks and brow, a face somehow ravaged by stillness. The boy, he watches his mother watch nothing, his entire self inside the phantom oval of her face, invisible.
• Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.
• Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. How you’d come home, night after night, plop down on the couch, and fall asleep inside a minute. I’d come back with your glass of water and you’d already be snoring, your hands in your lap like two partially scaled fish.
• * Because there are no salaries, health care, or contracts, the body being the only material to work with and work from. Having nothing, it becomes its own contract, a testimony of presence. We will do this for decades—until our lungs can no longer breathe without swelling,
• * Then, the crow’s-feet on your eyes only slightly starker, you wrap your fingers around the air where her calf should be, knead it as if it were fully there. You continue down her invisible foot, rub its bony upper side before cupping the heel with your other hand, pinching along the Achilles’ tendon, then stretching the stiff cords along the ankle’s underside... Without a word, you slide the towel under the phantom limb, pad down the air, the muscle memory in your arms firing the familiar efficient motions, revealing what’s not there, the way a conductor’s movements make the music somehow more real.
• I placed the coin at the base of your neck and pulled it outward, across your shoulder blades. I scraped and rescraped in firm, steady strokes, the way you taught me, until russet streaks rose from under the white flesh, the welts deepening into violet grains across your back like new, dark ribs, releasing the bad winds from your body. Through this careful bruising, you heal. <> I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.
• Connecticut River, past the suburbs with their suicidally pristine lawns,
• The jackrabbits dipped in and out of the rows, and once in a while a machete would come down on one and you could hear, even through the clink of blades, the shrill yelp of a thing leaving the earth we stood on. <> But the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me. A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again. A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations.
• * 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.
• And because I am your son, I said, “Sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.
• Up until then I didn’t think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.
• * Before he could make out his mother’s face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another, then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother.
• I studied him like a new word. His reddish lips stuck out from the helmet’s visor. The Adam’s apple, oddly small, a blip in a line drawn by a tired artist. It was dark enough for my eyes to swallow all of him without ever seeing him clearly. Like eating with the lights off—it still nourished even if you didn’t know where your body ends.
• * Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?
• Under my fingers, the stretch marks above his knees, on his shoulders, and the base of his spine shone silver and new. He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That’s what I wanted—not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger.
• And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again, each time entering the same room? Yes, I wanted it all. I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season. Until I was numb.
• What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.
• He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower away from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll say yes.
• * After he came, when he tried to hold me, his lips on my shoulder, I pushed him away, pulled my boxers on, and went to rinse my mouth. <> Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.
• with the strands whittled down to a small half-inch tail at the nape. It was the part that shone like wheat-tips touched by sunlight, while the rest of his head, with its fuller hair, stayed dark brown. I flicked my tongue under it. How could such a hard-stitched boy possess something so delicate, made entirely of edges, of endings? Between my lips, it was a bud sprouted from inside him, possible. This part is the good part of Trevor, I thought. Not the squirrel shooter.
• they were no older than six, an age where one could be ecstatic just by moving. They were little bells struck to singing, it seems, by air itself.
• They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.
• How, four months into your pregnancy, when a child’s face becomes a face, your husband, my father, pressured by his family, forced you to abort him... “People were putting sawdust in the rice to stretch it. You were lucky if you had rats to eat.” <> You spoke carefully, as if the story was a flame in your hands in the wind.
• * That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity. <> That night, in the bare-bulb kitchen, I knelt beside you and watched as you painted, in long strokes that swooped, with expert precision, over the cobalt scars along the bike, the bottle of pink nail polish steady and sure in your hand.
• Could it be that, all those years ago, I had followed Gramoz in the schoolyard simply because he was a boy, and therefore a mirror of myself? <> But if so—why not? Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here.
• It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?
• * But for now, the city brims before us with a strange, rare brilliance—as if it was not a city at all, but the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapons above us.
• The veal are the children of cows, are calves. They are locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home. The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.
• And you wanted to be real, to be swallowed by what drowns you only to surface, brimming at the mouth. Which is kissing.
• Because you remembered
  and memory is a second chance.
  Both of you lying beneath the slide: two commas with no words, at last, to keep you apart.
  You who crawled from the wreck of summer like sons leaving their mothers’ bodies.
• I wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself.
• * kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. Lying on the mat with you, I cannot help but want us to be our own kipuka, our own aftermath, visible. But I know better.
• The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.
• They will tell you that great writing “breaks free” from the political, thereby “transcending” the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They’ll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let’s see how it’s made, they’ll say—as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.
• “That’s crazy.” He laughed, the fake one you use to test the thickness of a silence.
• Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?
• A few hours later, you and Mai rolled Lan on her side and, with a rubber-gloved hand, removed the feces from your mother’s body—too wasted to expel its own waste. I kept fanning her face, jeweled with sweat, her eyes shut as you worked. When it was over, she just lay there blinking.
• After a while, the pain melted into a strange ache, a weightless numbness that swept through me like a new, even warmer season. The feeling brought on, not by tenderness, as from caress, but by the body having no choice but to accommodate pain by dulling it into an impossible, radiating pleasure. Getting fucked in the ass felt good, I learned, when you outlast your own hurt. <> What Simone Weil said: Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying “I.”
• In my Hartford, where the insurance companies that made us the big city had all moved out once the Internet arrived, and our best minds were sucked up by New York or Boston. Where everybody’s second cousin was in the Latin Kings. Where we still sell Whalers jerseys at the bus station twenty years after the Whalers ditched this place to became the Carolina Hurricanes. Hartford of Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, writers whose vast imaginations failed to hold, in either flesh or ink, bodies like ours.
• * A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.
• funeral: It was only when I came close enough to see their features, the jutted and heavy jawlines, the low forward brows, did I realize the singers were in drag. Their sequined outfits of varying cuts and primary colors sparkled so intensely it seemed they were donning the very reduction of stars.
• * Neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called “delaying sadness.”... As much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is still a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns. <> Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.
• Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name—Lan—in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. From that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son.
  All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
  Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.
• “Yeah, something like that,” he said with sleepiness. “Like a family. A fucked family.” <> I felt this sudden surge of tenderness for him right then, a feeling so rare in me back then it felt like I was being displaced by it.
• The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn’t so much surprised by its effect—how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves—but that it was ever mine to see. 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.
• Ranchers often sell off the calves at night, ferrying them away on truck beds while the mothers slept in their stalls so they wouldn’t wake up screaming for their babies. Some would wail so hard their throats would swell shut and a balloon had to be placed inside and inflated to expand the neck muscles.