On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Rose’s hands are hideous; they reflect her life of struggle and work in factories and nail salons. To Little Dog, a nail salon is “more than a place of work and a workshop for beauty, it is also a place where our children are raised” (79). Many Vietnamese immigrants work in nail salons, unable to find better paying work.

Little Dog is 10 years old. His mother runs a nail salon on Sundays. A wizened old woman comes in for a pedicure. Little Dog helps her into the salon chair. She has a prosthetic leg. She asks Rose to pretend to massage the phantom limb; she can feel it. The old woman gives Rose $100 and leaves.

That night, Little Dog scrapes Rose’s back with a quarter dipped in Vicks VapoRub in a way she taught him. In the present, Little Dog contemplates the importance of writing about his mother.

At 14, Little Dog gets a job at a tobacco farm outside Hartford. It’s summer of 2003, and Rose’s nightmares were getting worse. Little Dog once finds her “at the kitchen table at some god-awful hour, butt naked, sweating, and counting [her] tips in order to buy ‘a secret bunker’” to protect from potential terrorist attacks (87).

Most of Little Dog’s coworkers only speak Spanish. They call him “Chinito.” Most are seasonal workers. The owner of the farm, Mr. Buford, reminds Little Dog of “that maniac sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, the one who got his brains blown out by one of his own privates for being an asshole” (89). He is nice enough and tells him to follow the directions of the crew leader, Manny. The work is hard, but Little Dog reflects, “The work somehow sutured a fracture inside me” (90). Little Dog becomes skilled in nonverbal communication.

“Sorry” is the most common word in the nail salon. “Sorry” emphasize the power dynamic between the customer and the manicurist: it puts the customer in a position of power. The same dynamic takes place with the laborers on Mr. Buford’s farm.

Little Dog meets Trevor, Mr. Buford’s grandson, working on the farm. Instead of saying hello, Little Dog says sorry.

Little Dog’s interest in Trevor grows to something akin to desire, “the coiled charge of its possibility” (96). Trevor is a junior in high school, while Little Dog is a freshman. Trevor hates his alcoholic father. They quickly become good friends. They share a joint laced with cocaine and listen to a football game on a radio in the barn of the tobacco farm, growing gradually closer. Little Dog initiates their first physically intimate moment. Lying together later that night, Trevor wonders aloud why he was born; Little Dog pretends not to hear.

Little Dog recalls his mother’s abuse several times, including when she locked him in the basement for wetting the bed. He remembers how Lan helped heal his bruised face with a hot, hardboiled egg.

Little Dog works at the farm for two more summers but maintains a relationship with Trevor all the while. It is October 16 when Little Dog first finds himself beautiful while viewing his body in a mirror after bathing.

Trevor lives with his dad in a run-down mobile home up the interstate. Trevor and Little Dog listen to a new 50 Cent album in Trevor’s room. Little Dog is attracted to Trevor’s personality. They have sex whenever they can. Little Dog is always aware of Trevor’s social standing: “[Trevor] was always white. And I knew this was why there was a space for us” (111).

Driving high on cocaine and fentanyl, Trevor wrecks his dad’s truck in a cornfield. He and Little Dog crawl out of the gas-soaked wreckage. Trevor’s dad runs past them; they shamefully retreat into the pine woods, where they lie together, singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

When Trevor and Little Dog have sex, they do so without penetration. Little Dog is submissive. Little Dog accepts the violence of Trevor’s love. When Trevor offers to do the same for Little Dog, he recants the offer, saying “I can’t. I just—I mean […] I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t, man” (120).

Little Dog recalls the day his father was arrested. Little Dog was a toddler. His father beat his mother bloody. Lan ran outside for help. When the police came, the father waved a 20 dollar bill, like he would “back in Saigon, where the cops would take the money, tell the boy’s mother to calm down and take a walk, then leave as if nothing happened” (116). The father was arrested; Rose was taken away in an ambulance.

Little Dog recalls the time they rode bikes to a gas station on Thanksgiving, eating microwaved egg sandwiches on a stoop. He remembers the time he ran away from home at age 10 and the time he found his mother smoking outside and told her that he hated her.

Little Dog reveals his sexuality to his mother on a rainy Sunday at a Dunkin Donuts. He does not want to use the Vietnamese word for gay, derived from the French word for pedophile, so he tells her in English that he does not like girls. Rose does not disown him, as he feared. However, she does ask, “when did this start? I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy. I know that. When?” (131). She is concerned that he will want to wear dresses.

Rose tells Little Dog that he has a deceased older brother. Rose was 17 when her husband forced her to abort their child. They did not want to have a child during a famine.

Little Dog does not want to hear all of his mother’s story, but she does not stop. Rose took pills for a month. Long after the pregnancy should have been terminated, she felt a kick, and they rushed to the emergency room. Barely anesthetized, Rose says the doctors “just ‘scraped my baby out of me, like seeds from a papaya’” (135). The image is too much for Little Dog. Rose says that the aborted son visited her in a dream. She rushes to the Dunkin Donuts bathroom to vomit.

Little Dog remembers one lunchtime in elementary school when a boy named Gramoz offered him a pizza bagel. Little Dog wanted to pay him back, but his English was inadequate. Gramoz called him a freak after Little Dog followed him around the playground.

A while after the incident with Gramoz, Rose bought Little Dog a cheap, pink bike. A boy knocked him off the bike and scraped off the pink paint. Little Dog reflects, “That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be” (134). Rose painted over the scratches on the bike with pink nail polish.

Little Dog and Trevor sit in the living room of Trevor’s trailer. Trevor’s dad, drunk and watching television, thinks they are laughing at them. He starts ranting about his brother James, a Vietnam veteran, who bragged about killing and burning Vietnamese people. Trevor mouths off to his dad; his dad gets angry, and Trevor and Little Dog leave.

They ride their bikes through the neighborhoods Little Dog grew up in. Little Dog thinks of the various connotations he has with their surroundings. They ride until they are exhausted, stopping in an affluent area of Hartford. They almost argue, but stop, awestruck by the view of the city lights from their hill.

After the car wreck, Trevor runs away. Little Dog finds him shivering in the park. He attempts to warm him up. They fall asleep. Little Dog listens to Trevor’s heartbeat “like an animal/ learning how to speak” (160).