On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

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  —

  You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

  * * *

  —

  The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.”

  What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.

  The morning closed in around us.

  I put down the book. The heads of the green beans went on snapping. They thunked in the steel sink like fingers. “You’re not a monster,” I said.

  But I lied.

  What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

  I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say possessing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes to the body.

  I don’t know.

  What I do know is that back at Goodwill you handed me the white dress, your eyes glazed and wide. “Can you read this,” you said, “and tell me if it’s fireproof?” I searched the hem, studied the print on the tag, and, not yet able to read myself, said, “Yeah.” Said it anyway. “Yeah,” I lied, holding the dress up to your chin. “It’s fireproof.”

  Days later, a neighborhood boy, riding by on his bike, would see me wearing that very dress—I had put it on thinking I would look more like you—in the front yard while you were at work. At recess the next day, the kids would call me freak, fairy, fag. I would learn, much later, that those words were also iterations of monster.

  Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.

  “That’s so good to know, baby.” You stared off, stone-faced, over my shoulder, the dress held to your chest. “That’s so good.”

  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 have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it.

  Look.

  In a previous draft of this letter, one I’ve since deleted, I told you how I came to be a writer. How I, the first in our family to go to college, squandered it on a degree in English. How I fled my shitty high school to spend my days in New York lost in library stacks, reading obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences—and least of all that those sentences would save me. But none of that matters now. What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know.

  What happened was that I was a boy once and bruiseless. I was eight when I stood in the one-bedroom apartment in Hartford staring at Grandma Lan’s sleeping face. Despite being your mother, she is nothing like you; her skin three shades darker, the color of dirt after a rainstorm, spread over a skeletal face whose eyes shone like chipped glass. I can’t say what made me leave the green pile of army men and walk over to where she lay under a blanket on the hardwood, arms folded across her chest. Her eyes moved behind their lids as she slept. Her forehead, lashed deep with lines, marked her fifty-six years. A fly landed on the side of her mouth, then skittered to the edge of her purplish lips. Her left cheek spasmed a few seconds. The skin, pocked with large black pores, rippled in the sunlight. I had never seen so much movement in sleep before—except in dogs who run in dreams none of us will ever know.

  But it was stillness, I realize now, that I sought, not of her body, which kept ticking as she slept, but of her mind. Only in this twitching quiet did her brain, wild and explosive during waking hours, cool itself into something like calm. I’m watching a stranger, I thought, one whose lips creased into an expression of contentment alien to the Lan I knew awake, the one whose sentences rambled and rattled out of her, her schizophrenia only worse now since the war. But wildness is how I had always known her. Ever since I could remember, she flickered before me, dipping in and out of sense. Which was why, studying her now, tranquil in the afternoon light, was like looking back in time.

  The eye opened. Glazed by a milky film of sleep, it widened to hold my image. I stood against myself, pinned by the shaft of light through the window. Then the second eye opened, this one slightly pink but clearer. “You hungry, Little Dog?” she asked, her face expressionless, as if still asleep.

  I nodded.

  “What should we eat in a time like this?” She gestured around the room.

  A rhetorical question, I decided, and bit my lip.

  But I was wrong. “I said What can we eat?” She sat up, her shoulder-length hair splayed out behind her like a cartoon character just blasted with TNT. She crawled over, squatted before the toy army men, picked one up from the pile, pinched it between her fingers, and studied it. Her nails, perfectly painted and manicured by you, with your usual precision, were the only unblemished thing about her. Decorous and ruby-glossed, they stood out from her callused and chapped knuckles as she held the soldier, a radio operator, and examined it as though a newly unearthed artifact.

  A radio mounted to his back, the soldier crouches on one knee, shouting forever into the receiver. His attire suggests he’s fighting in WWII. “Who yoo arrgh, messeur?” she asked the plastic man in broken English and French. In one jerking motion, she pressed his radio to her ear and listened intently, her eyes on me. “You know what they telling me, Little Dog?” she whispered in Vietnamese. “They say—” She dipped her head to one side, leaned in to me, her breath a mix of Ricola cough drops and the meaty scent of sleep, the little green man’s head swallowed by her ear. “They say good soldiers only win when their grandmas feed them.” She let out a single, clipped cackle—then stopped, her expression suddenly blank, and placed the radio man in my hand, closed it into a fist. Like that she rose and shuffled off to the kitchen, her sandals clapping behind her. I clutched the message, the plastic antennae stabbing my palm as the sound of reggae, muffled through a neighbor’s wall, seeped into the room.

  * * *

  —

  I have and have had many names. Little Dog was what Lan called me. What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.

  * * *

  —

  I sat on the kitchen tiles and watched Lan scoop two steaming mounds of rice into a porcelain bowl rimmed with painted indigo vines. She g
rabbed a teapot and poured a stream of jasmine tea over the rice, just enough for a few grains to float in the pale amber liquid. Sitting on the floor, we passed the fragrant, steaming bowl between us. It tasted the way you’d imagine mashed flowers would taste—bitter and dry, with a bright and sweet aftertaste. “True peasant food.” Lan grinned. “This is our fast food, Little Dog. This is our McDonald’s!” She tilted to one side and let out a huge fart. I followed her lead and let one go myself, prompting us to both laugh with our eyes closed. Then she stopped. “Finish it.” She pointed with her chin at the bowl. “Every grain of rice you leave behind is one maggot you eat in hell.” She removed the rubber band from her wrist and tied her hair in a bun.

  They say that trauma affects not only the brain, but the body too, its musculature, joints, and posture. Lan’s back was perpetually bent—so much so that I could barely see her head as she stood at the sink. Only the knot of tied-back hair was visible, bobbing as she scrubbed.

  She glanced at the pantry shelf, empty save for a lone half-eaten jar of peanut butter. “I have to buy more bread.”

  * * *

  —

  One night, a day or two before Independence Day, the neighbors were shooting fireworks from a rooftop down the block. Phosphorescent streaks raked up the purple, light-polluted sky and shredded into huge explosions that reverberated through our apartment. I was asleep on the living room floor, wedged between you and Lan, when I felt the warmth of her body, which was pressed all night against my back, vanish. When I turned, she was on her knees, scratching wildly at the blankets. Before I could ask what was wrong, her hand, cold and wet, grabbed my mouth. She placed her finger over her lips.

  “Shhh. If you scream,” I heard her say, “the mortars will know where we are.”

  The streetlight in her eyes reflecting jaundiced pools on her dark face. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the window, where we crouched, huddled under the sill, listening to the bangs ricochet above us. Slowly, she guided me into her lap and we waited.

  She went on, in whispered bursts, about the mortars, her hand periodically covering my lower face—the scent of garlic and Tiger Balm sharp in my nose. We must have sat for two hours like that, her heartbeat steady on my back as the room began to grey, then washed in indigo, revealing two sleeping forms swaddled in blankets and stretched across the floor before us: you and your sister, Mai. You resembled soft mountain ranges on a snowy tundra. My family, I thought, was this silent arctic landscape, placid at last after a night of artillery fire. When Lan’s chin grew heavy on my shoulder, her exhales evening out in my ear, I knew she had finally joined her daughters in sleep, and the snow in July—smooth, total, and nameless—was all I could see.

  * * *

  —

  Before I was Little Dog, I had another name—the name I was born with. One October afternoon in a banana-thatched hut outside Saigon, on the same rice paddy you grew up on, I became your son. As Lan told it, a local shaman and his two assistants squatted outside the hut waiting for the first cries. After Lan and the midwives cut the umbilical cord, the shaman and his helpers rushed in, wrapped me, still sticky with birth, in a white cloth, and raced to the nearby river, where I was bathed under veils of incense smoke and sage.

  Screaming, ash smudged across my forehead, I was placed in my father’s arms and the shaman whispered the name he had given me. It means Patriotic Leader of the Nation, the shaman explained. Having been hired by my father, and noticing my old man’s gruff demeanor, the way he puffed out his chest to widen his 5ft-2in frame as he walked, speaking with gestures that resembled blows, the shaman picked a name, I imagine, that would satisfy the man who paid him. And he was right. My father beamed, Lan said, lifting me over his head at the hut’s threshold. “My son will be the leader of Vietnam,” he shouted. But in two years, Vietnam—which, thirteen years after the war and still in shambles—would grow so dire that we would flee the very ground he stood on, the soil where, a few feet away, your blood had made a dark red circle between your legs, turning the dirt there into fresh mud—and I was alive.

  * * *

  —

  Other times, Lan seemed ambivalent to noise. Do you remember that one night, after we had gathered around Lan to hear a story after dinner, and the gunshots started firing off across the street? Although gunshots were not uncommon in Hartford, I was never prepared for the sound—piercing yet somehow more mundane than I imagined, like little league home runs cracked one after another out of the night’s park. We all screamed—you, Aunt Mai, and I—our cheeks and noses pressed to the floor. “Someone turn off the lights,” you shouted.

  After the room went black for a few seconds, Lan said, “What? It’s only three shots.” Her voice came from the exact place where she was sitting. She hadn’t even flinched. “Is it not? Are you dead or are you breathing?”

  Her clothes rustled against her skin as she waved us over. “In the war, entire villages would go up before you know where your balls were.” She blew her nose. “Now turn the light back on before I forget where I left off.”

  With Lan, one of my tasks was to take a pair of tweezers and pluck, one by one, the grey hairs from her head. “The snow in my hair,” she explained, “it makes my head itch. Will you pluck my itchy hairs, Little Dog? The snow is rooting into me.” She slid a pair of tweezers between my fingers, “Make Grandma young today, okay?” she said real quiet, grinning.

  For this work I was paid in stories. After positioning her head under the window’s light, I would kneel on a pillow behind her, the tweezers ready in my grip. She would start to talk, her tone dropping an octave, drifting deep into a narrative. Mostly, as was her way, she rambled, the tales cycling one after another. They spiraled out from her mind only to return the next week with the same introduction: “Now this one, Little Dog, this one will really take you out. You ready? Are you even interested in what I’m saying? Good. Because I never lie.” A familiar story would follow, punctuated with the same dramatic pauses and inflections during moments of suspense or crucial turns. I’d mouth along with the sentences, as if watching a film for the umpteenth time—a movie made by Lan’s words and animated by my imagination. In this way, we collaborated.

  As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open into them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

  There were personal stories too. Like the time she told of how you were born, of the white American serviceman deployed on a navy destroyer in Cam Ranh Bay. How Lan met him wearing her purple áo dài, the split sides billowing behind her under the bar lights as she walked. How, by then, she had already left her first husband from an arranged marriage. How, as a young woman living in a wartime city for the first time with no family, it was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive. As she spoke, my hand slowed, then stilled. I was engrossed in the film playing across the apartment walls. I had forgotten myself into her story, had lost my way, willingly, until she reached back and swatted my thigh. “Hey, don’t you sleep on me now!” But I wasn’t asleep. I was standing next to her as her purple dress swayed in the smoky bar, the glasses clinking under the scent of motor oil and cigars, of vodka and gunsmoke from the soldiers’ uniforms.

  “Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me stay young, get this snow off of my life—get it all off my life.” I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us.

  * * *

  —

  And then ther
e was the school bus. That morning, like all mornings, no one sat next to me. I pressed myself against the window and filled my vision with the outside, mauve with early dark: the Motel 6, the Kline’s Laundromat, not yet opened, a beige and hoodless Toyota stranded in a front yard with a tire swing half tilted in dirt. As the bus sped up, bits of the city whirled by like objects in a washing machine. All around me the boys jostled each other. I felt the wind from their quick-jerked limbs behind my neck, their swooping arms and fists displacing the air. Knowing the face I possess, its rare features in these parts, I pushed my head harder against the window to avoid them. That’s when I saw a spark in the middle of a parking lot outside. It wasn’t until I heard their voices behind me that I realized the spark came from inside my head. That someone had shoved my face into the glass.

  “Speak English,” said the boy with a yellow bowl cut, his jowls flushed and rippling.

  The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. I had the urge to break through the pane and leap out the window.

  “Hey.” The jowlboy leaned in, his vinegar mouth on the side of my cheek. “Don’t you ever say nothin’? Don’t you speak English?” He grabbed my shoulder and spun me to face him. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers. The boys crowded around me, sensing entertainment. I could smell their fresh-laundered clothes, the lavender and lilac in the softeners.

  They waited to see what would happen. When I did nothing but close my eyes, the boy slapped me.

  “Say something.” He shoved his fleshy nose against my blazed cheek. “Can’t you say even one thing?”

  The second slap came from above, from another boy.

  Bowlcut cupped my chin and steered my head toward him. “Say my name then.” He blinked, his eyelashes, long and blond, nearly nothing, quivered. “Like your mom did last night.”