On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Section 1 Summary

Protagonist Little Dog decides to write to his mother after reading Roland Barthe’s Mourning Diary, though his mother is still alive. He recalls her horror at seeing a taxidermy deer and the time he triggered her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by shouting “Boom!” while dressed as a soldier. Little Dog remembers trying and failing to teach his mother to read. She was abusive to him as a child. Little Dog recalls various instances of his closeness with his mother, marred by her instability. He finally told his mom to stop hitting him when he was 13.

Little Dog muses on migration through the fragile lives of monarch butterflies; only the butterflies’ “children return; only the future revisits the past” (8). He wonders, “What is a country but a life sentence?” (9).

Little Dog is 28 years old. He describes himself as “handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else” (10).

He recalls the time that his mother stopped cooking and said, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother” (13). Little Dog comforted her; but he lied. He wanted to tell her that “a monster is not such a terrible thing to be” (13). He speculates that her abusive ways stem from her PTSD. Little Dog writes, “You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I” (14).

Little Dog remembers putting on one of his mother’s dresses and a neighbor boy bullying him for doing so.

Part 1, Section 2 Summary

In a previous draft of his letter, Little Dog told his mother how he became a writer. Little Dog recalls watching Grandma Lan sleep; she was only peaceful when she slept due to PTSD and schizophrenia. Lan wakes up, questioning Little Dog about what they should eat. She turns her questioning to one of his plastic army soldiers.

Little Dog was born in his mother’s village in Vietnam. His original name means “Patriotic Leader of the Nation” (20). Little Dog is the name Lan gave him, due to superstitions from her village in Vietnam. Despite his father’s ambitions for him, the Vietnam War forced them from the village two years later. Little Dog recalls hearing gunshots close by in their home in Hartford, Connecticut. His mother and Aunt Mai became hysterical, but Lan did not even flinch.

Little Dog recalls sitting alone on the school bus, trying to avoid the looks of the other boys because of his Asian features. A boy with a yellow bowl cut harasses him. Though only nine, this boy “had mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers” (24). Little Dog cries to himself on the bus. That night, Little Dog’s mother berates him for allowing other children to bully him. She slaps him, then tells him he needs to learn to use his English to stop the bullies.

Little Dog’s mother’s English is very limited. During a trip to the grocery store when Little Dog was young, she struggled to ask the butcher for oxtail. Little Dog was ashamed at her inability to speak English. Even her Vietnamese only reached the second-grade level: an American napalm raid destroyed her school. Little Dog’s Vietnamese is a mark of where his mother’s education ended. He reflects that “to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war” (32). From this point on, Little Dog is his family’s unofficial interpreter, due to his own shame.

Part 1, Section 3 Summary

A helicopter bears down on a girl and her daughter at a military checkpoint in 1968 Vietnam. An American GI points his gun at them, deliberating on whether to shoot them or let them go. The girl is Lan; she’s run away from an abusive marriage. Lan named herself; her family only called her “Seven,” her place in the birth order of her siblings. Her daughter is Rose, Little Dog’s mother. Lan voids her bladder in fear. To appease the soldier, she repeats over and over, “Yoo Et Aye numbuh won” (42). The guard allows her to pass into the burning village.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a garage in Vietnam, a group of men strap a macaque onto a table. They cut its head open and eat its brain as it screams, struggles, and eventually dies.

Part 1, Section 4 Summary

As a child, Little Dog visits his white grandfather, Paul. Paul met Lan while he was stationed in Vietnam. After running away from her husband, Lan became a prostitute for American GIs, something she carries guilt for thereafter. When she met Paul, they hit it off immediately due to the fact that they both grew up in rural farming communities.

Little Dog hears what he thinks is an animal in distress in the garage late at night. It turns out to be Paul, crying over his memories of Lan evoked by a Vietnamese folk song Little Dog had been singing at dinner. The narrator of the song looks for her sister among a field of corpses.

When they first came to America, Little Dog, Lan, and Rose moved to a Latinx neighborhood. Rose is so fair skinned that she could pass for white, were it not for her broken English. The family was unaware of the importance of skin color in America.

Rose told Little Dog that Paul is not her father: Lan was already four months pregnant with an unknown American’s child. Little Dog wants to tell this to Paul but does not. Paul smokes a joint, and Little Dog listens as he rambles, unburdening his mind. Little Dog recalls Rose crying for her real father during the first church service they attended; she prayed for her real father to find her. As a child in Vietnam, the other children bullied Rose for being part white.

Paul finishes his story and suggests that Little Dog does not have to call him grandpa anymore; Little Dog, however, wants to. A neighbor thinks Little Dog is Paul’s hired dog walker; she speaks to him as if he does not know English. Paul emphatically introduces Little Dog as his grandson.

Part 1, Section 5 Summary

Little Dog recalls being in the back seat of his mom’s car. Rose frantically drives to Mai’s hose: she thinks Mai’s husband, Carl, is going to kill her. Lan thinks they are in a helicopter.

When they get to Mai’s house, Rose flies from the car brandishing a machete. A white man bearing a shotgun chases her away. It is not Carl. Mai actually moved to Florida five years ago, and Rose has had a mental lapse. They drive off. Little Dog sees the man’s son pretending to shoot them with a toy pistol. Little Dog writes, “I look him dead in the eyes and do what you do. I refuse to die” (71).

Part 1 Analysis

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from Little Dog to Rose. However, because Rose cannot read, the letter becomes a space for Little Dog to come to terms with the violence in his family’s past. Stylistically, Vuong has written the novel in an almost stream of consciousness style. Part 1 Section 1 exemplifies this: Little Dog’s narration jumps from instance to instance of Rose abusing him as he grew up. The novel jumps fluidly between the past and the present, allowing Little Dog to be “present” in key instances of his grandma Lan’s life, long before he was even born.

Migration and trauma define Little Dog’s upbringing. In Part 1, Little Dog introduces monarch butterflies as a symbol of migration, beauty, and ephemerality. At this point in the novel, they are a tragic symbol: They die before they can return to where they came from, so their children complete their migration. However, as Little Dog writes, the butterflies will become symbolic for familial regeneration.

Little Dog is interested in names and their efficacy in vesting meaning in the real world. It is peculiar, therefore, that his real name never appears in the novel. Little Dog’s original name meant Patriotic Leader of the Nation. This hypermasculine, nationalistic meaning is ironic: Little Dog’s homosexuality and his unwillingness/inability to see a country as more than a “life sentence” make this an inappropriate name. Just as Lan named Rose and renamed herself, she gave Little Dog his nickname, which he takes to mean that “To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive” (18).