On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I’ve taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it.”

Little Dog’s letter is “god’s loneliest creation” because its meaning will likely be lost on its intended recipient. Little Dog has a complicated relationship with his mother. He recognizes some of her own flaws in himself; however, rather than monsters, this makes them both human.

“What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who.”

Little Dog’s real name never appears in the novel. Lan named him based on a tradition from her village intended to protect the youngest family members from demons. This name helps Little Dog shape his reality in America.

“Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods, one of the greatest golfers in the world, is, like you, Ma, a direct Product of the war in Vietnam.”

By including Tiger Woods’s backstory in this section, Little Dog demonstrates some of the cultural impact of the Vietnam War. Woods’s background parallels Little Dog’s. Paul’s and Earl Woods’s trajectory through the war are similar—except for the fact that Woods did not abandon his family.

“Up to that point I thought I had, if nothing else, a tether to this country, a grandfather, one with a face and an identity, a man who could read and write, one who called me on my birthdays, whom I was part of, whose American name ran inside my blood. Now that cord was cut.”

Paul’s connection to his family is strained because he abandoned them in Vietnam. It is unclear whether Rose is correct that Paul is not her father. However, for Little Dog, the personal connection he has to his grandfather is stronger than whatever blood tie they may or may not have.

“I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.”

Years of laboring in the toxic environment of nail salons has battered and calloused Rose’s hands. Like many Vietnamese immigrants, Rose is unable to find a better career and move up in the world. The low skill requirements make the job an attractive trap.

“In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes a 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.”

A person’s choice in language helps position them socially. In the nail salons, “sorry” becomes a lingua franca between the stylists and the customers, creating an implicit hierarchy where the stylists are subservient. Little Dog internalizes this use of “sorry” and uses it in his everyday life.

“I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.”

This passage introduces the theme suggested by the title, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Little Dog sees his own beauty for the first time reflected through his experiences with Trevor. Because of his intimate connection with Trevor—his first intimate connection with another person—he is able to see himself reflected as Trevor sees him: beautiful.

“He was white, I never forgot this. He was always white. And I knew that this was why there was a space for us: a farm, a field, a barn, a house, an hour, two.”

Little Dog associates race with geography and freedom. In his ethnic neighborhood of Hartford, space and privacy are limited. It is Trevor’s whiteness that gives them access to wider space and allows them to explore their sexuality.

“‘Your mom. She not normal okay? She pain. She hurt. But she want you. She need us.’ She stirred in place. The leaves crackled. ‘She love you, Little Dog. But she sick. Sick like me. In the brains.’”

When Rose’s abuse drives young Little Dog to run away, Lan is the one who comes after him. Lan does her best to shield Little Dog from Rose’s abuse. In addition, Lan recognizes both her own mental illness and her daughter’s. Her words help Little Dog reconcile the dichotomy between Rose’s abuse and her deep love for him.

“Before the French Occupation, our Vietnamese did not have a name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.”

Little Dog runs up against a language barrier based on colonialism, conflict derived from European values, his mother’s lack of English skills, and his own disconnect from his Vietnamese origins. He is consistently concerned with the way that language captures reality. He has no adequate way for articulating his reality for Rose to understand.

“A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so natural makes. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?”

The final time they see each other, Little Dog notes the comma-shaped neck scar. Its shape strikes Little Dog as representative of the fact that they did not know they would never see each other again. Their paring would be a “period,” a finality, instead of a “comma,” the prospect of seeing each other again.

“Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses.”

Little Dog came of age during a time when smaller communities on the East Coast of the US were plagued by the opioid epidemic. Fentanyl, a potent opiate, has proved especially addictive and deadly. After Trevor was prescribed OxyContin, he slid into opiate addiction, demonstrated by the track marks down his arms.

“But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?”

It bothers Little Dog that language and writing are so often depicted in violent terms. Though he says that destruction is not necessary for art, he does not believe that is true. Trauma, violence, and loss are the exigence for the letter he is writing to Rose.

“Trevor being who he was, raised in the fabric and muscle of American masculinity, I feared for what would come. It was my fault. I had tainted him with my faggotry, the filthiness of our act exposed by my body’s failure to contain itself.”

Aside from his homosexuality, Trevor embodies many of the stereotypes of American masculinity. Little Dog worries that Trevor will see him as a corrupting or perverting influence. However, Trevor proves him wrong by cleaning him, loving him, and telling him “you good,” the common Hartford greeting/statement of solidarity.

“I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.”

As a literature student, Little Dog sees his world in terms of writing and theory. However, philosophizing about the nature of death has abstracted it, and Little Dog finds theory and literature inadequate to help him cope with Lan’s death. Rose and Mai contrast this by directly acting and preparing their mother’s body.

“As I look at Paul’s face on the screen, this soft-spoken man, this stranger turned grandfather turned family, I realize how little I know of us, of my country, any country.”

Though Paul may not be Little Dog’s blood grandfather, he is his closest link to America. Paul’s emotional apology to Lan’s grave reveals what he likely told Little Dog in Part 1 Section 4. Though it was Paul’s family who tried to sever his tie with Lan, he still knew that he was married to Lan and had a daughter back in Vietnam.

“To ask What’s good? Was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. But because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another.”

In Little Dog’s Hartford life is rough: merely surviving among the opioid epidemic, the shootings, and poverty is a victory in and of itself. For Little Dog, the greeting “What’s good?” is a bond of solidarity and defiance against all odds, shared between the residents of his city.

“You’re Rose. You’re Lan. You’re Trevor. As if a name can be more than one thing, deep and wide as a night with a truck idling at its edge, and you can step right out of your cage, where I wait for you. Where, under the stars, we see at last what we’ve made of each other in the light of long-dead things—and call it good.”

Little Dog’s recognition that his mother’s name is also the past tense of “rise” causes him to unite his loves and losses, synthesizing into his idea of freedom. Names form a persona geography for Little Dog. They form a “landscape” that he can attempt to map, even as meaning recedes from the gap between the signified and the signifier.

“‘Remember,’ you said each morning before we stepped out in the cold Connecticut air, ‘don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re already Vietnamese.’”

Rose reminds Little Dog that he sticks out in American society for being Vietnamese, emphasizing the intersectionality of Little Dog’s identity. As he traverses the funeral and drag show in Saigon, the phrase echoes in his mind. Little Dog begins to feel a greater sense of connection to his heritage.

“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.”

By renaming herself Lan, Little Dog’s grandmother linked herself and her descendants to the “beautiful country” she came from. Instead of the violence that much of the narrative focuses on, Little Dog begins to focus on the beautiful moments, coincidences, and serendipities that comprise his life. This passage also alludes to the theme of the novel, hinted at by the title, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

Little Dog and his family have suffered from loss, PTSD, and generational trauma. He recognizes that it has shaped who they are. However, he has come to terms with this: Though his family is imperfect, they have not been irrevocably harmed (or “spoiled”) by their experiences.

“I can’t make out the individuals—their bodies linked to one another in an incessant surge of touch, each six-legged letter dark blue in the dusk—fractals of a timeworn alphabet. No, these are not monarchs. They are the ones who, come winter, will stay, will turn their flesh into seeds and burrow deeper—only to break through the warm spring loam, ravenous.”

Unlike the passing beauty of the migrating monarch butterflies, the ants Rose points out to Little Dog in Paul’s garden do not leave their home, and they are not gorgeous. However, they are hardy survivors—just like Lan, Rose, and Little Dog. Little Dog’s family stayed in the cold of Hartford rather than moving to Houston or California like most of the other Vietnamese immigrants in their area.

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”

This passage informs the title of the novel. If human life is brief in the cosmic sense, then beauty is brief as well. By correlation, the ugliness, pain, and trauma of life is brief as well. Trevor exemplifies this definition of beauty that Little Dog has developed.