Metaphors in On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous

Pound for pound, Ocean Vuong might be the greatest sentence writer I’ve ever come across –– more so than even Charles Bukowski and Ernest Hemingway.

His first and only novel to date, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is blooming with such an array of delicious imagery and succulent sentences that, at times, you find yourself needing to put it down to cleanse your palate and dab your mouth with a clean, well-starched napkin, before continuing on.

Anyway, here are a few dozen lines of Vuongs that made me pause…

*Ocean Vuong is typing now*

1. I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you –– but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relive ourselves.

2. We would get a small paper bag containing maybe five or six squares of chocolate we had picked at random. This was often all we bought at the mall. Then we’d walk, passing one back and forth until our fingers shone inky and sweet. “This is how you enjoy your life,” you’d say, sucking your fingers, their pink nail polish chipped from a week of giving pedicures.

3. Our hands empty except for our hands.

4. I had never seen so much movement in sleep before –– except in dogs who run in dreams none of us will ever know.

5. She sat up, her shoulder-length hair splayed out behind her like a cartoon character just blasted with TNT.

6. “Finish it.” She pointed with her chin at the bowl. “Every grain of rice you leave behind is one maggot you eat in hell.”

7. Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows.

8. “When we get this high up, the clouds turn into boulders –– hard rocks –– that’s what you’re feeling.”

9. Everything good is always somewhere else.

10. He smokes the way one smokes after a funeral.

11. It’s a shotgun. It shoots two eaters at once. They eat your lungs inside out. Little dog, tell her.

12. Your hands are hideous –– and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream.

13. I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.

14. He has just finished crying and is now entering that state where his jaw shudders to calm itself shut.

15. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

16. Everybody wants to sit higher and higher.

17. We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.

18. He looked like Elvis on his last day alive.

19. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

20. Where the Evangelical boss –– the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them –– never gave us any breaks.

21. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s book huge.

22. I miss you more than I remember you.

23. Round the corner by the traffic light blinking yellow. Because that’s what the lights do in our town after midnight –– they forget why they’re here.

24. The room is silent as a photograph.

25. We try to preserve life –– even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

26. The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life.

27. Then, your chin turning into a peach pit, you lower your face into your hands.

28. –– as if a name is also a sound we can be found in.

29. How it was pouring rain or it was snowing or the streets were flooded or the sky was the color of bruises.

    Ocean vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother; the narrator recounts his life together with his mother and grandmother as refugees in America after the American war in Vietnam; it is also a queer coming-of-age story where the narrator negotiates his racialized intimacy with an American whiteboy, Trevor, in suburban Connecticut. In On Earth, the narrator employs the trope of animality (in the evocations of monarch butterflies, dog, cat, bees, macaque/monkey, buffalo/veal/heifer)—as detour, metaphor, analogy—to make sense of his people’s migrating history, of his loved ones’ character, and to evoke the environmental disaster. The narrator aptly claims at the end of the novel: “What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals” (242).

    The southwards migration of monarch butterflies from Canada or the United States to Mexico for refuge in the winter is juxtaposed next to the recount of Vietnamese refugees’ presence in America. Vuong uses the metaphor of this monarch migration to think of the migration of Vietnamese refugees to the United States as (temporally) precarious and dangerous: “It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation [of monarchs]. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing” (4). In the middle of the novel’s section I, we are told that the men in the village, where the narrator’s grandma is from, enact the custom of splitting live macaques’ skulls wide open and feed directly from the animal in order to enhance their virility; at the same, the narrator’s mother, Hong, is also born in the year of the monkey–she characterizes herself as such: “I’m a monkey,” she says (240); amid the violence of war, bestiality, and the violent American working-condition upon Hong’s body, we cannot help but see the history violence subsumed and embedded into the metaphoric animality.

    Beyond evoking the characteristic migration of another species to parallel that of humans, the animal can also merge with or is attached to the human’s character. Once, in the middle of the night, the narrator wakes up to “the sound of an animal in distress”; he traces the sound, speculating that it might be “a cat wounded,” but finds out it is actually his (adopted) grandfather crying in the kitchen; “There are no animals here but us,” the narrators says (45-6). Moreover, Trevor, the narrator’s lover, is characterized as “the hunter,” “the carnivore” but who would never eat veal because “ the difference between veal and beef is the children [; t]he veal are the children”–Trevor’s toxic masculinity embedded in the “carnivore” is offset/destabilized by his (homo)sexuality in his refusal to eat “veal”  (155). The narrator’s real name is never revealed—instead, he is referred to as “Little Dog,” a term of endearment as well as of protection his maternal grandmother fashions for him, so that the evil spirits (who only hunt for pretty and strong children), will hear it and think him diminutive and leave him alone. Thus, the narrator is also characterized by the animal.

    Alongside the human history of migration and the human character, the evocation of animality is also the warning for environmental disasters.  The narrator’s grandfather laments that the bees “are dying and how, without them, the country would lose its entire food supply in less than three months” (53). When Trevor and Little Dog first have anal sex, it was outside the barn; amid coitus, hovering above them were moths; however, “[t]he pesticides left over from the fields killed [the moths] soon as they placed their mouths on the leaves” (203). So, the act of human pleasure exists alongside the destruction of animals. In the trope of animality, the narrator doesn’t just use animals to think of humans’ life, but he highlights also the violence humans have enacted upon animals’ life, and subsequently the Earth they inhabit.

    What does the Table represent in On Earth were Briefly Gorgeous?

    The Table. Many of Little Dog's random memories involve a wooden kitchen table he thinks he remembers from this youth, which symbolizes the power of suggestion on memory in Ocean Vuong's On Earth we're Briefly Gorgeous…

    What are some metaphors in Long Way Down?

    Examples of Figurative Language in Long Way Down “trying / to eat / all of / us as / if we / are beef.” “My mother used to say, / I know you're young, / gotta get it out, / but just remember, when / you're walking in the nighttime, / make sure the nighttime / ain't walking into you.”

    What is the conflict in on earth we're briefly gorgeous?

    Trevor suffers from an addiction to OxyContin, while Little Dog is haunted by the Vietnam War, through the ways it has traumatized his grandmother Lan and his abusive, conflicted mother, who takes out her frustrations on her son.

    What are some good similes and metaphors?

    Simile: Rapunzel's hair was as soft as clouds. Simile: Cinderella's slippers were as shiny as the sun. Metaphor: The snow is a white blanket. Metaphor: The calm lake was a mirror about what was to come.