55 pages • 1 hour read
Ocean VuongOn Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Little Dog
A Vietnamese American literature student and writer, Little Dog is the protagonist and narrator of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The novel is a letter Little Dog writes to his mother, Rose, despite the fact that she will not be able to read it. At the time of writing the letter to Rose, Little Dog writes “I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else” (10). Little Dog is a gay Vietnamese American former literature student and writer from Hartford, Connecticut. He grew up with his mother and grandmother, Lan, in a rough, mostly Latinx, lower working-class neighborhood. Little Dog is a deeply poetic narrator who views the world in terms of the ability and inability of language to capture the human body and the human experience.
Little Dog’s childhood and adolescence is marked by violence, loss, and self-discovery. He witnesses his father’s arrest for beating his mother, and, in turn, suffers abuse from his mother, who often struck him hard enough to draw blood. As a freshman in high school, Little Dog takes a job as a harvester on Mr. Buford’s tobacco farm. There, he meets Trevor, a troubled, all-American high school junior. He and Trevor have a tumultuous relationship for several years, until Trevor falls into drug abuse and dies in a car wreck. Lan dies as well, and while in Vietnam for her funeral, Little Dog discovers a feeling of connection to his home country. Throughout the process of writing his letter to Rose, Little Dog relives his loves and losses and gradually discovers that the beauty of human life is inseparable from pain and violence but is all the more beautiful for it.
Rose
Daughter of Lan and mother of Little Dog, Rose is the intended recipient of the letter that comprises the text of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Rose was born in Vietnam shortly after the war. Lan’s husband, Paul, an American GI, effectively abandoned Lan and Rose in Vietnam, returning home because his mother feigned illness. Rose claims that an unknown GI is her father, not Paul. Because she is half-white, Rose is of very light complexion and has red hair. She suffered bullying for this in her home village and can pass for white in America, though her poor English singles her out as a “foreigner.”
Rose is a deeply complex, flawed person; Little Dog initially calls her a monster, though by the end of the novel, he seems to reconcile her violence and flaws with her beauty and tenderness. Rose was the victim of domestic violence inflicted by Little Dog’s father, who was arrested and presumably sent to prison for it. Rose suffers from some form of delusional psychosis, likely schizophrenia, worsened by PTSD. Some of this is due to generational trauma, inherited from her mother and the aftereffects of the Vietnam War. After immigrating to Hartford, Connecticut with her husband, Lan, and Little Dog in 1990, Rose, like many Vietnamese women in the US, works in a nail salon, a job that provides no upward mobility and produces a gradual negative impact on her health. Little Dog’s narrative focuses less on Rose’s abuse toward him and more on her resilience and positive qualities as he reconciles his family’s past with his present. Though flawed, Rose cares deeply for her son and did her best as a single mother to provide for him.
Lan
Lan is the mother of Rose and Mai and the grandmother of Little Dog. Lan grew up in the small Vietnamese village of Go Cong, where she was the seventh child in her family. Lan’s family merely called her “Seven”; she later named herself Lan, or “beautiful,” mirroring the “beautiful country” that she came from. Lan suffers from mental illness and PTSD; she is conscious of this fact, and she tells Little Dog that Rose suffers from the same. Lan is instrumental in Little Dog’s upbringing, often shielding him from Rose’s abuse or helping him recover from the effects of it. Lan dies from bone cancer in her leg. As she dies, she likens the pain to the burning of the huts in her Village. She is cremated, and her remains are interred in her beloved Go Cong.
Trevor
Little Dog’s first love, Trevor, is a white Hartford teenager and the grandson of Buford, the owner of a tobacco farm where Little Dog works during the summer of his sophomore and junior years of high school. Trevor is two years older than Little Dog. Trevor, like many of the characters in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is deeply flawed. While he enters into a sexual relationship with Little Dog fairly quickly after they meet, it is difficult for Trevor to reconcile his sexuality with his upbringing and his understanding of traditional masculinity.
Like many of his and Little Dog’s friends, Trevor falls into opioid addiction. Trevor wrecked his father’s truck, went into rehab, and relapsed into addiction. The last time they ever saw each other, Little Dog notices track marks on Trevor’s forearms, indicating he had recently been injecting heroin or fentanyl. Trevor later died in a car wreck after overdosing on a combination of the two drugs.
Paul
Although he may not be related by blood, Paul is Little Dog’s grandfather, and the former husband of Lan. Rose, assumed to be his daughter, claims her real father is someone else. Despite this, Little Dog shares a bond with Paul that transcends the potential lack of blood connection. To Little Dog, Paul is his only concrete foothold in America. Paul is an aging Vietnam veteran who met Lan in a brothel during, or shortly after, the war.
Paul harbors a deep guilt for abandoning his family. He realizes that his mother tricked him into coming back from Vietnam; however, by the time that Lan immigrated, Paul had been remarried for eight years. Though Little Dog does not say what happened, Paul and Lan evidently never reconciled. At Lan’s funeral, Little Dog holds his laptop webcam up to Lan’s grave so Paul can pay his emotional last respects and apologize to her in the broken Vietnamese he kept throughout the years. Paul maintains a relationship with Rose and Little Dog even after Lan’s death.
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