Book Reads: On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

 

Finally had the chance to sit down and write about Ocean Vuong's Novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Never thought I would be crying reading this book. 

The story started with Dear Ma; I stopped midway when the author said, "I didn't know the war was inside you". As a reader, I can only imagine what his mother felt, or how he reacted when he tried to amuse her with a little fun in BOOM. 

The novel was a letter from a son who couldn't read to his mother. The speaker, Little Dog, addresses this story to his mother Hong, about his feelings, his questions, his family, their lives, immigrating from Vietnam, traumas from war, mental illness, drugs, love, and how the societal expectations, aspects, and racism affect their relationship.

As I was reading through the pages of the Novel, it gave me shivers to the extent where I stopped reading and then slowly picking it up again; and I have heard this from somewhere, "You know that a novel is great when you grieve with the characters"  and I did. 

I couldn't believe that this is fiction. I felt like I was scorching an old cabinet with old letters from the past. Letters that haven't been opened. Letters, I would sit down to read in the middle of the night as tears fell. 

They say that the eyes holds so much of history and the eyes shows what a persons feels, our eyes are doors to one's soul and in Little Dog's perspective and words , the eyes holds nothing despite of how the world was seen through one's pupil, "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."  It felt like the eyes, our eyes, have seen so much yet it's unaware of it's emotional connection. That our eyes in relation to what we feel is just a receiver, it doesn't participate in any emotional aspects it could see. 

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.” this line made feel like yes our eyes are close to each other, but they don't share as much emotion as my heart does. Despite of that my eyes long something beyond what it could see. That desire of something even deeper than hunger and emptiness that my eyes, our eyes couldn't comprehend. 

But in the end, through the emotions of our hearts, the eyes see what they want to see, what they want to preserve, just like all our senses. 

Words are so powerful that conveying them with feelings can affect your soul. There's this line Little Dog have said "It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being." Little Dog's emotion is so raw that I felt he was real. How those poetry streams into your veins and shivers you with feelings you have never felt. "Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you." Imagine hearing this words, reading this words, this is an epitome of words having more feelings than your actual feelings. 

In relation to words, there's this part in his book when the word "Sorry becomes a currency". this is how he shared his mom's experience working in a nail salon. Sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable 

And I felt it, sometimes apologizing loses its meaning when someone's definition of apology resonates in the environment we are in. One’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at onceWe tend to overuse the word sorry and then forget what apology really should be. 

But what had made me tear is no matter what, love of his mother and her love for him are written in our hearts not only to listen but to heal. That at the end of the day, when someone leaves, (yes, we would remember the memories, the sadness, the happiness, the little things we shared with the people we love, especially our parents, our MOM, ) what remains is the LOVE they gave for us. How they love us, how we loved them back, and those memories that remind us of them are all about love. “I miss you more than I remember you.”

As I was reading through the ends of the pages I felt this is one beautiful art of love, art of poetry, art of life. It affected me through the courses of weeks I have read it. But as Little Dog have said in this letters, “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?” and I guess this novel was meant to find me.