On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: Immigration, Trauma, Recognition: "Happy Birthday, Ocean!"

Ocean Vuong, an emigrant at age two from war, is a Vietnamese American poet and novelist who debuted his first novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019, Penguin Press). Voung discusses his book and his experience on Amanpour and Company (aired 10-31-19). Amanpour found it “compelling” and “a poignant ode to marginalized immigrants.” Voung’s novel is written in the form of a letter to his illiterate mother. 

Vuong’s mother cautioned him as an immigrant “to be invisible,””to go out and disappear,”  “to hide yourself in order to protect yourself,” but Vuong “wanted to be known.” He hoped “to honor [his] journey.” On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is semi autobiographical and a coming of age story about a gay man whose family is working its way out of poverty, Vuong was inspired and empowered by Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. 

Vuong recalls being put in timeout by his elementary school teacher and being so invisible that she forgot about him. The other students had gone to lunch when she discovers him still seated in the corner. “It is so easy for a small yellow child to vanish. The hard work, the real work that requires innovation, is to be known,” says Vuong. He found that being an artist is a powerful way to be known.

A lonely boy in Hartford, CT, Vuong wrote his own poems. His teacher thought Vuong had plagiarized them. “It was terrifying to be in trouble for your imagination.” But he also had never felt so respected and feared [for] being “unfathomable.” He notes the two stereotypes of Asian Americans: the math whiz (genetic) and the musical prodigy (from “the unjust (and inhumane) parenting of tiger moms” as if not the musician’s own agency), [see Eng and Han's 2000 paper A Dialogue on Racial Melancholy on the 'model minority'] “and always in service of … European music”  To be an Asian American artist creating original works is “inconceivable” to other.

His mother and grandmother suffered with PTSD and Vuong grew up surrounded by the pervasive violence found in his mostly black and brown neighborhood, with its police brutality, and violence in his home, even toward him. He saw “that anger was the death of creativity and innovation...Anger is a force that extinguishers the wielder as well as the world....As a writer, as a thinker I am most useful to myself and my world when I ask ‘Now, what?...How do we change what happened to us into how we live better?’“