Abstract:

This article examines Ocean Vuong’s semi-autobiographical novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by focusing on how the oppressions of race, gender, class, and sexuality overlap for the Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in America. Among many difficulties, many Vietnamese lives are marked by the intergenerational transmission of emotional pain, and it deterred parents from forming a healthy relationship with their offsprings. As a queer, second-generation Vietnamese American writer, Vuong is raised in a toxic household since he is subjected to physical and emotional abuse of his war traumatized mother. On Earth, written in epistolary form, offers a glimpse into the many-layered anxieties, insecurities of Vuong’s family and reveals how the legacy of the Vietnam War still pervades their life in all spheres in America. His narrative, “as a line of communication,” is a significant step towards liberating the women in his family from the subaltern status. Speaking from the terrain of otherness and rejecting castration by the forces that victimized his mother and grandmother, Vuong also proves that it is possible to transform the resentment he harbors into something fruitful, and anger can be instrumental in reconciliation and healing.

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