On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

  The night blazed up before me. People were suddenly everywhere, a kaleidoscope of colors, garments, limbs, the glint of jewelry and sequins. Vendors were selling fresh coconuts, cut mangoes, rice cakes pressed into gooey masses wrapped in banana leaves and steamed in large metal vats, sugarcane juice sold in sandwich bags cut at the corners, one of them now held by a boy who sucked from the plastic, beaming. A man, his arms nearly black from sun, squatted in the street. He worked over a cutting board no larger than his palm, halved a roasted chicken with a single deft cleaver blow, then distributed the slippery pieces to a flock of waiting kids.

  Between string lights hung low from balconies on each side of the street, I glimpsed a makeshift stage. On it, a group of elaborately dressed women gyrated, their arms colorful banners in the breeze, singing karaoke. Their voices broke off and floated down the street. Nearby, a small TV, propped on a plastic white dining table, displayed the lyrics to a Vietnamese pop song from the eighties.

  You’re already Vietnamese.

  I hovered closer, still dazed from sleep. It seemed the city had forgotten the time—or rather, forgotten time itself. From what I knew there was no holiday, no occasion for jubilation. In fact, just beyond the street, where the main road began, the roads were empty, quiet as they should’ve been at that hour. All the commotion was contained on a single block. Where people now laughed and sang. Children, some young as five, ran through swaying adults. Grandmothers in paisley and floral pajamas sat on plastic footstools by doorways chewing on toothpicks, whose heads stopped bobbing to the music only to shout at the kids around them.

  In the ground, Lan is already Vietnamese.

  It was only when I came close enough to see their features, the jutted and heavy jawlines, the low forward brows, did I realize the singers were in drag. Their sequined outfits of varying cuts and primary colors sparkled so intensely it seemed they were donning the very reduction of stars.

  I remember my father, which is to say I am cuffing him with these little words. I am giving him to you with hands behind his back, his head ducking into the patrol car because like the table, this was how it was given to me: from mouths that never articulated the sounds inside a book.

  To the right of the stage were four people with their backs to everyone else. Heads bowed, they were the only ones not moving—as if enclosed in an invisible room. They stared at something on a long plastic table in front of them, their heads so low they looked decapitated. After a while, one of them, a woman with silver hair, rested her head on the shoulder of a young man to her right—and began to weep.

  I remember getting a letter from my father while he was in prison, the envelope wrinkled, torn at the edges. I remember holding up a piece of paper covered with lines and lines whited out where the prison guards censored his words. I remember scraping at the chalky film that lay between my father and me. Those words. Nuts and bolts to a table. A table in a room with no people.

  I stepped closer, and that’s when I saw on the table, impossibly still, the distinct form of a body covered in a white sheet. By now all four mourners were openly weeping while, on stage, the singer’s falsetto cut through their racked sobs.

  Nauseous, I searched the starless sky. A plane blinked red, then white, then blurred behind a band of clouds.

  I remember studying my father’s letter and seeing a scatter of tiny black dots: the periods left untouched. A vernacular of silence. I remember thinking everyone I ever loved was a single black dot on a bright page. I remember drawing a line from one dot to another with a name on each one until I ended with a family tree that looked more like a barbed-wire fence. I remember tearing it to shreds.

  Later, I would learn that this was a common scene on a Saigon night. City coroners, underfunded, don’t always work around the clock. When someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. As a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. Neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called “delaying sadness.”

  In Saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death—or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.

  It’s through the drag performers’ explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. As much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is still a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns.

  Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.

  * * *

  —

  I remember the table. How flames started to lick at its edges.

  I remember my first Thanksgiving. I was at Junior’s house. Lan had made me a plate of fried eggrolls to bring over. I remember a house filled with over twenty people. People who slapped the table when they laughed. I remember food being piled on my plate: mashed potatoes, turkey, cornbread, chitlins, greens, sweet potato pie, and—eggrolls. Everyone praising Lan’s eggrolls as they dipped them in gravy. How I, too, dipped them in gravy.

  I remember Junior’s mother putting a black plastic circle on a wooden machine. How the circle spun and spun until music happened. How music was the sound of a woman wailing. How everyone closed their eyes and tilted their heads as if listening to a secret message. I remember thinking I’d heard this before, from my mother and grandmother. Yes. I heard this even inside the womb. It was the Vietnamese lullaby. How every lullaby began with wailing, as if pain could not exit the body any other way. I remember swaying while listening to my grandmother’s voice crooning through the machine. How Junior’s father slapped me on the shoulder. “What you know about Etta James?” I remember happiness.

  I remember my first year in an American school, the trip to the farm, how afterward, Mr. Zappadia gave each student a ditto of a black-and-white cow. “Color in what you saw today,” he said. I remember seeing how sad the cows were at the farm, their large heads lulled behind electric fences. And because I was six, I remember believing color was a kind of happiness—so I took the brightest shades in the crayon box and filled my sad cow with purple, orange, red, auburn, magenta, pewter, fuchsia, glittered grey, lime green.

  I remember Mr. Zappadia shouting, his beard trembling above me as a hairy hand grabbed my rainbow cow and crushed it in its fingers. “I said color in what you saw.” I remember doing it over. I remember leaving my cow blank and staring out the window. How the sky was blue and merciless. How I sat there, among my peers—unreal.

  In that street, beside the lifeless person who was somehow more animated in stillness than the living, the perpetual stench of sewage and runoff that lined the gutters, my vision blurred, the colors pooled under my lids. Passersby offered sympathetic nods, thinking I was part of the family. As I rubbed my face, a middle-aged man gripped my neck, the way Vietnamese fathers or uncles often do when trying to pour their strength into you. “You’ll see her again. Hey, hey,” his voice croaked and stung with alcohol, “you gonna see her.” He slapped the back of my neck. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”

  * * *

  —

  This man. This white man. This Paul who swings open the wooden garden gate, the metal latch clanking behind him, is not my grandfather by blood—but by action.

  Why did he volunteer in Vietnam when so many boys were heading to Canada to dodge the draft? I know he never told you—because he would have had to explain his abstract and implacable love of the trumpet in a language he would falter in. How he wanted, as he claimed, to be “a white Miles Davis” from the backwoods and cornfields of rural Vi
rginia. How the trumpet’s fat notes reverberated through the two-story farmhouse of his boyhood. The one with its doors torn clean off by a father who raged through the rooms terrorizing his family. The father whose only connection to Paul was metal: the shell lodged in his old man’s brain from the day he stormed Omaha beach; the brass Paul lifted to his mouth to make music.

  I remember the table. How I tried to give it back to you. How you held me in your arms and brushed my hair, saying, “There, there. It’s okay. It’s okay.” But this is a lie.

  It went more like this: I gave you the table, Ma—which is to say I handed you my rainbow cow, pulled out of the wastebasket when Mr. Zappadia wasn’t looking. How the colors moved and crinkled in your hands. How I tried to tell you but did not have the language you would understand. Do you understand? I was a gaping wound in the middle of America and you were inside me asking, Where are we? Where are we, baby?

  I remember looking at you for a long time and, because I was six, I thought I could simply transmit my thoughts into your head if I stared hard enough. I remember crying in rage. How you had no idea. How you put your hand underneath my shirt and scratched my back anyways. I remember sleeping like that, calmed—my crushed cow expanding on the nightstand like a slow-motion color bomb.

  Paul played music to get away—and when his old man tore up his application for music school, Paul got even further, all the way to the enlistment office, and found himself, at nineteen, in South East Asia.

  They say everything happens for a reason—but I can’t tell you why the dead always outnumber the living.

  I can’t tell you why some monarchs, on their way south, simply stop flying, their wings all of a sudden too heavy, not entirely their own—and fall away, deleting themselves from the story.

  I can’t tell you why, on that street in Saigon, as the corpse lay under the sheet, I kept hearing, not the song in the drag singer’s throat, but the one inside my own. “Many men, many, many, many, many men. Wish death ’pon me.” The street throbbed and spun its shredded colors around me.

  In the commotion, I noticed the body had shifted. The head fell to one side, pulling the sheet with it and revealing the nape of a neck—already pale. And there, just under the ear, no larger than a fingernail, a jade earring dangled, then stopped. “Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me. Blood in my eye dawg and I can’t see.”

  * * *

  —

  I remember you grabbing my shoulders. How it was pouring rain or it was snowing or the streets were flooded or the sky was the color of bruises. And you were kneeling on the sidewalk tying my powder-blue shoes, saying, “Remember. Remember. You’re already Vietnamese.” You’re already. You’re all ready.

  Already gone.

  I remember the sidewalk, how we pushed the rusty cart to the church and soup kitchen on New Britain Ave. I remember the sidewalk. How it started to bleed: little drops of rouge appearing beneath the cart. How there was a trail of blood ahead of us. And behind us. Someone must have been shot or stabbed the night before. How we kept going. You said, “Don’t look down, baby. Don’t look down.” The church so far away. The steeple a stitch in the sky. “Don’t look down. Don’t look down.”

  I remember Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hands wet over mine. Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hand so hot. Your hand my own. I remember you saying, “Little Dog, look up. Look up. See? Do you see the birds in the trees?” I remember it was February. The trees were black and bare against an overcast sky. But you kept talking: “Look! The birds. So many colors. Blue birds. Red birds. Magenta birds. Glittered birds.” Your finger pointed to the twisted branches. “Don’t you see the nest of yellow chicks, the green mother feeding them worms?”

  I remember how your eyes widened. I remember staring and staring at the end of your finger until, at last, an emerald blur ripened into realness. And I saw them. The birds. All of them. How they flourished like fruit as your mouth opened and closed and the words wouldn’t stop coloring the trees. I remember forgetting the blood. I remember never looking down.

  Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name—Lan—in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. From that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son.

  All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.

  Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.

  * * *

  —

  Paul is behind me by the gate, clipping a bushel of mint leaves to garnish the pesto. His scissors snap at the stems. A squirrel hurries down from a nearby sycamore, stops at the base, sniffs the air, then doubles back, vanishing up the branches. You’re just ahead as I approach; my shadow touches your heels.

  “Little Dog,” you say, without turning, the sun long gone from the garden, “come here and look at this.” You point to the ground at your feet, your voice a whisper-shout. “Isn’t this crazy?”

  I remember the room. How it burned because Lan sung of fire, surrounded by her daughters. Smoke rising and collecting in the corners. The table in the middle a bright blaze. The women with their eyes closed and the words relentless. The walls a moving screen of images flashing as each verse descended to the next: a sunlit intersection in a city no longer there. A city with no name. A white man standing beside a tank with his black-haired daughter in his arms. A family sleeping in a bomb crater. A family hiding underneath a table. Do you understand? All I was given was a table. A table in lieu of a house. A table in lieu of history.

  “There was a house in Saigon,” you told me. “One night, your father, drunk, came home and beat me for the first time at the kitchen table. You were not born yet.”

  * * *

  —

  But I remember the table anyway. It exists and does not exist. An inheritance assembled with bare mouths. And nouns. And ash. I remember the table as a shard embedded in the brain. How some will call it shrapnel. And some will call it art.

  I am at your side now as you point at the ground where, just beyond your toes, a colony of ants pours across the dirt patch, a flood of black animation so thick it resembles the shadow of a person that won’t materialize. I can’t make out the individuals—their bodies linked to one another in an incessant surge of touch, each six-legged letter dark blue in the dusk—fractals of a timeworn alphabet. No, these are not monarchs. They are the ones who, come winter, will stay, will turn their flesh into seeds and burrow deeper—only to break through the warm spring loam, ravenous.

  I remember the walls curling like a canvas as the fire blazed. The ceiling a rush of black smoke. I remember crawling to the table, how it was now a pile of soot, then dipping my fingers into it. My nails blackening with my country. My country dissolving on my tongue. I remember cupping the ash and writing the words live live live on the foreheads of the three women sitting in the room. How the ash eventually hardened into ink on a blank page. How there’s ash on this very page. How there’s enough for everyone.

  You straighten up, dust off your pants. Night drains all colors from the garden. We walk, shadowless, toward the house. Inside, in the glow of shaded lamps, we roll up our sleeves, wash our hands. We speak, careful not to look too long at one another—then, with no words left between us, we set the table.

  I hear it in my dream. Then, eyes open, I hear it again—the low wail swooping across the razed fields. An animal. Always it is an animal whose pain is this articulate, this clear. I’m lying on the barn’s cool dirt floor. Above me, rows of tobacco hang, their limbs brushing against one another in a lone draft—which means it’s the third week of August. Through the slats, a new day, already thick with summer’s heat. The sound comes back and this time I sit up. It’s not until I see him that I know I’m fifteen again. Trevor’s a
sleep beside me. On his side, his arm a pillow, he looks more lost in thought than in sleep. His breath slow and eased, cut with hints of the Pabst we drank a few hours ago; the empties lined along on the bench above his head. A few feet away lies the metal army helmet, tipped back, the morning light, powder blue, collected in the bowl.

  Still in my boxers, I walk out into the vast haze. The howl returns, the sound deep and vacuous, as if it had walls, something you could hide in. It must be wounded. Only something in pain could make a sound you could enter.

  I search the flattened fields; mist wafts across the brown and tarnished soil. Nothing. It must be coming from the next farm. I walk, the humidity rises, my temples itch with new sweat.

  In the next field, the last of the tobacco, fat and dark green, a week away from harvest, rises on all sides—somehow higher than usual, their tips just above my head. There’s the oak where we’ll total the Chevy in two weeks. The crickets have yet to unhinge their legs and now serrate the dense air as I go deeper, stopping each time the bellow shoots up, louder, closer.

  Last night, under the rafters, our lips raw and spent from use, we lay, breathing. The dark quiet between us, I asked Trevor what Lan had asked me the week before.

  “You ever think about those buffaloes on the Discovery Channel? I mean, how they keep running off those cliffs?”

  He turned to me, his lip-fuzz brushed my arm. “The buffaloes?”

  “Yeah, how come they keep running like that, even after the ones in front of them fall off? You’d think one of them would stop, would turn around.”