On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

I’m having a bad day. I’m feeling invisible. I’m feeling like my voice is not heard.
What to do?
a) Shoot people
b) Shot women
c) Shoot women that appear like they are from Asia

You get my point. Despite what the young white gunman said, despite what the bald white police spokesperson said: This is a hate crime. And, yes, there is a pattern.

It started when the gunman who blames his porn addiction, began to see/unsee Asian women as a means to an end. Women in general have been the victims of this kind of unseeing for --- too long. Immigrant women have been the victim of this kind of transactional behavior for—ever.

Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous has been on my reading to-do list for a while and I was able to place a hold on the book and finally read it. It is a small book, to be read almost like poetry, line by line. Indeed, he is a poet, winner of the Eliot Prize and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. The poet writes a novel that feels like memoir. Written as a “letter” to his mother. Meta meta meta.

In this epistolary memoir/novel we feel as if there are two conversations. One between a sensitive boy and his mother and the second between the women in his life and the narrator. These women, a mother and a grandmother have both fought for their right to exist. Fleeing Vietnam and pasts filled with war and domestic violence, they came to America with the boy to start over. But, as life is one continuous stream, the starting again is complicated. Bits of pebbles, stone and grit, get carried along, downstream into this new world. Each of the three main characters have to deal with translation, figuring out who they are against an overwhelming backdrop called survival.

In the novel we see a hard-scrabble existence in Hartford CT of a Vietnamese women trying to make a living working menial jobs until finally making it: as a nail salon worker. That’s right. She works long long hours in her nail booth doing pedicures/manicures for white women. We watch her come home late in the evening and lie on the floor because her back is throbbing/broken under stress and subservience. The boy lies down next to her. And listens.

Both the mom and grandmother are victims of domestic violence. We are let in on scenes of chaotic beatings, rantings, threats of gun violence. We watch from a car window a woman being dragged around by her hair.

The police don’t seem to have any presence in the situation.

As I read the book, I felt like this was a story I’d read before—or maybe just seen on the streets of Little Saigon near my house in Uptown, Chicago, Argyle Street. Little Asian women with their backs hunched over carrying 20 pound bags of jasmine rice out to a waiting car. Grandmas watching the kids at the back of my favorite Thai restaurant, raising grandkids while Mom and Dad cook all day until closing time.

When I consider how this Thai place, the Thai waitstaff and cooks have been part of my life for the past 30 years, I want to know their story better. Those kids are grown, college educated, living outside the neighborhood. The small restaurant has gone through reiterations, renovations and is successful. There is a fear they will one day want to retire and close up shop.

Did they have bad days/good days? All their days. The hard work. The effort to assimilate.

Now add to that the fear of hate crimes.

Next time you are at a nail salon, waiting for your to-go order, at the cash register getting rung up, tell that person: Have a good day. See them. Hear them.