Lunch Ticket
  • Current Issue
  • Archive
    • Issues Archive
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Genre Archive
      • Creative Nonfiction
      • Essays
      • Fiction
      • Flash Prose
      • Interviews
      • Lunch Specials
      • Poetry
      • Translation
      • Visual Art
      • Young Adult
  • About
    • Mission Statement
    • Lunch Ticket Staff
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Achievements
    • Community
    • Contact
  • Weekly Content
    • Friday Lunch Blog
    • Midnight Snack
    • Amuse-Bouche
    • School Lunch
  • Contests
    • Diana Woods Award in CNF
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
    • Gabo Prize in Translation
      • Issue 26: Winter/Spring 2025
      • Issue 25: Summer/Fall 2024
      • Issue 24: Winter/Spring 2024
      • Issue 23: Summer/Fall 2023
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
    • Twitter Poetry Contest
      • 2021 Winners
      • 2020 Winners
      • 2019 Winners
  • Submissions
  • Search
  • Menu Menu
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • X

Writers Read: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

August 5, 2019/ Sona Gevorkian

Ocean Vuong is an award-winning author and celebrated poet whose young life and rise to literary acclaim parallels the narrative of his recently published novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous—a hard-won life of survival and self-discovery, full of courage and heart. Vuong’s history is inherently an American story: a farm-boy-turned-soldier from Michigan meets a country girl working as a sex worker during the Vietnam War; they fall in love, a daughter is born; the soldier returns home just before Saigon falls; and a family is torn apart, dismembered in order to survive. Their child is Vuong’s mother—half-American, half-Vietnamese—she is both Rose and Hong. At eighteen, she gives birth to a son who begins his life as Vinh Quoc. Vuong captures the paradoxical arithmetic of his origin in “Notebook Fragments”: “Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.”

At two years of age, Vuong emigrated with his mother and grandmother to the United States under Operation Babylift through a refugee camp in the Philippines. The family eventually settled in Hartford, Connecticut, an economically and ethnically-diverse community with a large migrant population simmering with racial and class tensions beneath a tenuous façade of suburbia. School was an amphitheater of bullying and exile for the displaced boy—immigrant, queer, and illiterate until the age of eleven. Vuong’s childhood involved yet another beginning. After divorcing his abusive father, Rose renamed her son. She gifted him a name full of wonder—Ocean—after learning its English meaning: a body of water connecting many countries yet belonging to none. As if his mother had projected an aptronym into the future to unspool and destine itself ahead of his arrival, Ocean claimed its qualities and threaded them into his poetry. His language is oft-described as fluid and his intuitive maneuverings of the English language fish-like—graceful and varied.

Vuong’s debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press), published in 2016, captivated readers and critics alike, winning a Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, only the second debut collection to receive that prestigious honor. Foreign Policy Magazine named Vuong one of “100 Leading Global Thinkers,” an essential voice in contemporary American political and cultural discourse, rewriting the lines of nationalism with his “reflections on the histories of Vietnam and America, and meditations on identity.” In Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Vuong’s absentee father took front and center stage in mythic proportions. Vuong now turns the page to his personal mythos and our attention to his troubled mother.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s luminous first novel, transcends genres and makes no excuses for blending literary forms. The story opens in a hushed refrain: “Let me begin again.” As if we’ve arrived in media res to eavesdrop on a private conversation, we pause and instinctively slowdown as we might when we reach the end of a lyrical poem. The quiet opening is an invitation from an achingly endearing voice to step into intimate space—to come closer and listen: “Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” Vuong’s introspective voice animates itself through his authorial surrogate, Little Dog, a Vietnamese-American writer who is in the act of penning a letter to his illiterate mother—a letter he will never send, one she will never read. Part coming-of-age, part Künstlerroman, part confessional, and part modern myth-making, Vuong’s novel treads in the realm of autofiction, embracing the autobiographical in a story borne from his marginalized circumstances, one he describes as “founded on truth but realized in the imagination.”

Ocean Vuong

That we are in the hands of a master storyteller who writes with a poet’s precision about fractious themes is clear. With a seer’s intuition, he guides us into uncomfortable terrains of migration and displacement, violence and love, trauma and loss, poverty and addiction, the body and identity, queerness and masculinity. Tightly controlled sentences lend his lyrical prose an elegance, reverberating off the page with a musicality that haunts as much as it is haunted. In Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Vuong’s poetry addressed similar themes, orbiting around the underlying question: what does it mean to fashion an American identity when it has to reckon with American violence? Violence as a means to self-knowledge is a motif that repeats in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and unflinchingly commands its own reckoning.

Vuong continues his interrogation of the American identity but adds another dimension in this novel: can words build bridges that transcend the wounds of generational trauma and the legacy of violence? Even if we lend our lived experiences the words necessary for healing, will they be heard by those closest to us?

I am writing because they told me never to start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free.

I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure.

Even after all these years, the contrast between our skin surprises me—the way a blank page does when my hand, gripping a pen, begins to move through its spatial field, trying to act upon its life without marring it. But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.

Just as Vuong’s first act of writing was an act of self-preservation, Little Dog turns to English to preserve and protect his family when he realizes the loss of language for them is permanent—“our mother tongue, then is no mother at all—but an orphan… to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war”—and vows to be their voice—“I’ll never be wordless when you need me to speak for you.” As a creative force capable of building and destroying worlds, re-writing history and universal myths, language itself is another character in this novel, modulating tension between people, between the past and present.

While Little Dog’s voice is central and propels the story forward, it is not singular: “I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.” Other voices emerge and reverberate through his as a collective echo. Little Dog is a boy from Vietnam who moves to America with his family and settles in Hartford, Connecticut, where his formative years take shape in a household of women traumatized by violence. His grandmother, Lan, is a schizophrenic and his mother, Rose, suffers from PTSD—both war survivors carry their losses on their scar-etched bodies and in their fractured minds. At fourteen, Little Dog is hired as farmhand on a tobacco plant where his notions of masculinity, specifically American masculinity, are challenged and where he confronts his homosexuality. His first relationship and sexual awakening are both tender and tumultuous—he falls in love with the owner’s son, a boy whose self-destruction is fueled by addiction. Little Dog eventually steps into his own life, leaving Hartford for New York, graduating from college, and becoming a writer.

The path there, however, is nonlinear and often illusory, time-bending and fragmented. Using a storytelling convention commonly found in classical East Asian dramatic works called kishōtenketsu—essentially, a plot without conflict—Vuong strives to shift Western narrative arcs typifying our stories. Vuong explains in an interview with Kevin Nguyen: “It insists that a narrative structure can survive and thrive on proximity alone,” and “[that] proximity builds tension.” Vuong thrives on bridging contradictions to draw his characters closer to one another. Love and violence, for example, are Janus twins playing out their eternal drama on the human body. Rose is physically abusive, yet Little Dog reasons that PTSD sufferers are more likely to hit their children, that “perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war”—an act of love after all. Little Dog refuses the stereotypical instinct to label mother as monster and therefore villain. Instead, he accepts his mother’s brokenness and re-imagines the fractals whole—as a rehabilitated mother-monster archetype. “To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal,” he affirms, “a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.” Vuong, therefore, creates his own cresting resonances, coaxing us closer and closer towards his intimate voice until his words have penetrated us through vivid imagery, evocative metaphors, lyrical sentences, and repetitive motifs—until his world is as real as ours.

“Dear Ma—Let me begin at the beginning,” Little Dog repeats towards the end of the novel, winding the story back to another kind of beginning. Though understated, Vuong’s tone shifts to a more somber tenor vibrating with measured calmness and unbridled vulnerability before closing the story on a wistfulness that feels surreal.

I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.

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

By rejecting a conflict-centered story with no villains and no victims, Vuong shifts our gaze inward, thereby expanding the possibilities of our literary and cultural narratives. He doesn’t strive for major epiphanies either for his characters or for us. He only beckons that we come closer and look as he shines a light at the spaces between words where darkness cowers and between people where formless wounds still bleed blue, red, and purple. These colors aren’t just for bruises, his voice reassures us—“Look up. See? Do you see? Blue birds. Red birds. Magenta birds. Glittered birds”—the winged and weightless, “flourishing like fruit.”

“And like a word I hold no weight in the world yet still carry my own life,” he writes. “And I throw it ahead of me until what I left behind becomes exactly what I’m running towards—like I’m part of a family.”

Ocean Vuong has gifted us a rare thing of beauty: a quiet, graceful novel filled with wisdom and empathy about the power of language to bridge our disparities and to create new narratives for ourselves—stories to heal and preserve one another as part of one human family.

Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel. Penguin Press, 2019.

Sona Gevorkian is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is Lead Editor of the Gabo Prize and the Amuse-Bouche Spotlight and Translation genres for the literary journal, Lunch Ticket. She currently lives in Northern California.

Amuse-Bouche Archive

  • 2025
  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2022
  • 2021
  • 2020
  • 2019
  • 2018
  • 2017
  • 2016
  • 2015
  • 2014
  • 2013

Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Gale-Headshot-01July2024.jpg 1791 1587 Gale Naylor https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Gale Naylor2025-05-09 11:55:262025-05-11 09:48:03Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Mitko_Grigorov.jpg 378 300 Mitko Grigorov https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Mitko Grigorov2025-03-14 11:00:082025-03-31 11:51:57Products of Our Environment

Mother-to-Mother: An Open Letter about White Privilege and Fragility

November 22, 2024/in Blog / Dr. Valerie Nyberg
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Nyberg-stairs-2.jpg 1600 1200 Dr. Valerie Nyberg https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Dr. Valerie Nyberg2024-11-22 11:55:082024-12-04 15:05:42Mother-to-Mother: An Open Letter about White Privilege and Fragility

More Friday Lunch Blog »

Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Lauren Howard
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Lauren-Howard-credit-Terril-Neely-scaled-773x1030-1.jpg 1030 773 Lauren Howard https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Lauren Howard2025-05-23 23:59:492025-05-20 16:45:44Dig Into Genre

The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/paparouna-photo.jpeg 960 720 paparouna https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png paparouna2025-04-25 23:55:312025-05-23 23:22:02The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/20220807-ariadnesaxt-MurielReid-01.jpg 1123 2000 Ariadne Will https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Ariadne Will2025-03-28 23:55:152025-03-31 11:49:32On The Map

More Midnight Snacks »

School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL-Insta-Brendan-Nurczyk-2.png 1500 1500 Brendan Nurczyk https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Brendan Nurczyk2021-05-12 10:18:392022-02-01 13:24:05I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-FB-Isabella-Dail.png 788 940 Isabella Dail https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Isabella Dail2021-04-28 11:34:132021-04-28 11:34:13A Communal Announcement

Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-Insta-Abigail-E.-Calimaran.png 1080 1080 Abigail E. Calimaran https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Abigail E. Calimaran2021-04-14 11:22:062021-04-14 11:22:06Seventeen

More School Lunch »

Word From the Editor

The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand…

More from the current editor »
Current Issue »

Connect With Us

lunchticket on facebooklunchticket on instaX
Submit to Lunch Ticket

A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.

Get Your Ticket

We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.

Newsletter Signup
Copyright © 2021 LunchTicket.org. All Rights Reserved. Web design and development by GoodWebWorks.
Scroll to top