I first heard of Ocean Vuong through Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being. There was so much to absorb, I couldn’t do it in one listen, and repeated it a few days later. Here was a young man, brought to the US from Vietnam at the age of two by his family. His father left them and, as Ocean says, he was raised by women — his mother, grandmother, and an aunt. He suffered the consequences of their PTSD, the inheritance from war, and all were illiterate.
Ocean was the first in his family who learned to read — at age eleven. In 2019, he was awarded the “Genius Grant” by the MacArthur Foundation. Other prestigious poetry and fiction awards preceded that one, beginning in 2014. At age thirty-three, he has racked up serious outside praise few can claim.
But I suspect that, had he not personally gone through heartbreaking trials and tragedies, and somehow digested them, Ocean would not have been able to translate, at the level he has, what it means to be an immigrant merged with a gay coming-of-age story. When I read his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I listened to the audiobook first. It was narrated by the author. I wanted to take it in through the voice I heard in the interview — compassionate, vulnerable, and distinctly observant — fragility imbued with strength. Then I read it. I wanted to linger over the words of wisdom that emerged from one so young and his accurate criticisms of our culture.
I was also reading Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge at the time, which had the same pull on me Ocean’s did. Both were clearly framed from the authors’ own lives. The only question remained: how little was fiction.
Ocean’s main character is known as Little Dog, the name representing something subhuman and insignificant, an old leftover practice from the village, meant out of love. In this way, it’s hoped he will not stand out and instead will be protected. Every morning his mother reminds him before he ventures out of his home, now in Hartford, “Don’t draw attention to yourself. You’re already Vietnamese.”
Reading that line truly distressed me. It makes a sad but unignorable statement on the resident bias running through American culture. I’m ashamed of it. In an interview, Ocean spoke about first-generation immigrants coming from war or extreme violence who sought to be invisible. Every day opens framed through fear. While he said, the second generation wants to be visible and express their freedom.
Pay attention and notice the compassion and astute understanding set into dialogue in his writing. Little Dog and his grandmother Lan are watching a nature show where a whole herd of buffalo, each following the one immediately in front of them, ultimately leap off a cliff. Lan exclaims, “Why do they die themselves like that?” Little Dog replies, “They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That’s all. They don’t know it’s a cliff.”
It’s often said that Ocean focuses on violence and tragedy. But he also has the gift of transmuting it into elements of beauty. This, too, is a form of moving beyond mere survivorship. Little Dog and his mother Rose had just come back to their dingy hotel from the Saigon cemetery, having laid Lan’s burial urn to rest. They’d carried it all the way from Hartford. Rose is disoriented. Little Dog says her name.
“Only when I utter the word do I realize that rose is also the past tense of rise. That in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. I say it as if it is the only answer to your question — as if a name is also a sound we can be found in. Where am I? Where am I? You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.”
I haven’t been so taken by a novel in quite some time. The book was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by the Washington Post and retains a long list of awards. A film adaptation is in the works.
This review first appeared on Medium.
I was rewarded in the first chapter when a character called Mascarita, in talking to the narrator, spoke of a wise man then saying, “I’m calling him a witch doctor so you know what I’m talking about.” He also used medicine man and shaman as a stand-in. Additionally, I learned that, while the Matsigenka may practice polygamy, it appears that a wise man sets himself apart from the villages, living in the jungle, or on a riverbank, even more simply than others, distinctly in solitude, communing with Nature.
Lynsey Addario is one of those people. Her memoir It’s What I do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War tells her story. She didn’t start out to be a conflict photographer, one who goes into war-torn areas and refugee camps, right in the middle of it. This eventuality wasn’t even on her radar when she took a job as a professional photographer at the Buenos Aires Herald at the age of 23, never having trained as a photographer. Yet, as willingness lays out a path, at 26 she traveled to Afghanistan to interview women living under the Taliban. How did she even do that? I’m guessing troubling thoughts at least flitted through her mind. She was moving into a field almost solely dominated by males and all it came with…that the course was filled with threat of all sorts around nearly every corner…that she was sacrificing any ‘normal’ love or family life. All this in addition to witnessing graphic horror, so much on a daily basis, the kind that typically gives nightmares for years to come.
This is a coming of age story in a special setting under difficult circumstances. It’s about what happens when norms are stripped away. When suddenly families are forcibly separated… elements of society previously valued devalued…control wrought by fear…what arises as a result…and the ways in which humans hang onto a piece of themselves and seek to thrive.
I stumbled across a brief note on Olive Oatman researching something else, and read The Blue Tatoo to learn the full history relating to what occurred from 1850 and continuing on well beyond her death in 1903. Olive Oatman’s name became inseparably intertwined with that of the Mojave and Yavapai Indians, a tragic story for all on a number of levels. The complete truth remains elusive. It varied significantly depending on who told the story and when…even becoming an episode of Death Valley Days, the old TV show. The Blue Tattoo may well be the most accurate and comprehensive account, the author Margot Mifflin having depended on historical documents, family diaries, letters and interviews.
The Lifepath Dialogues 