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Little Dog’s grandmother, Rose and Mai’s mother, and Paul’s ex-wife. Lan is born in the Go Cong District of Vietnam, and after leaving an arranged marriage in the late 1960s, she moves to Saigon. Lan is forced to work as a prostitute to survive during the Vietnam War, and she soon gives birth to Rose, the daughter of an “American john.” Lan meets and falls in love with Paul, an American soldier, in a Saigon bar in 1967. She marries Paul and has two more children, but when Paul goes to the United States for a visit, he is unable to return to Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon and the end of the war in 1975. Lan flees Vietnam with Rose, Mai, and Little Dog in 1990, and she later lives with Rose and Little Dog in Hartford, Connecticut. Lan is schizophrenic, a condition that is worsened by the trauma of war, and she is a big part of Little Dog’s life growing up. When Rose beats Little Dog, Lan uses her body as a shield to protect him, and she tenderly treats his cuts, bruises, and welts with old Vietnamese remedies. Lan tries to get Little Dog to see that his mother cares for him, even if Rose’s own mental illness makes it difficult for her to express herself. Lan tells Little Dog countless stories of their family and history in Vietnam, through which Little Dog learns about his Vietnamese identity. Lan dies of metastatic bone cancer at the end of the novel, and Rose and Little Dog take her ashes back to Vietnam for burial. Lan and her stories represent the power of memory and storytelling in the novel, but her character also represents the lasting effects of war on survivors. Like Rose, Lan likely has posttraumatic stress disorder, and the violence, fear, and pain of war remain with her throughout her life.
Lan Quotes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
The On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous quotes below are all either spoken by Lan or refer to Lan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1 Quotes
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.
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Paul finishes his portion of the story. And I want to tell him. I want to say that his daughter who is not his daughter was a half-white child in Go Cong, which meant the children called her ghost-girl, called Lan a traitor and a whore for sleeping with the enemy. How they cut her auburn-tinted hair while she walked home from the market, arms full with baskets of bananas and green squash, so that when she got home, there'd be only a few locks left above her forehead. How when she ran out of hair, they slapped buffalo shit on her face and shoulders to make her brown again, as if to be born lighter was a wrong that could be reversed.
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Part 3 Quotes
One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. "Why they die themselves like that?" she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: "They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That's all. They don’t know it's a cliff,"
"Maybe they should have a stop sign then."
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Lan Character Timeline in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
The timeline below shows where the character Lan appears in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1
...tell Rose “everything [she’ll] never know.” When Little Dog was small, he watched his grandma Lan sleep. Lan’s skin was much darker than Rose’s, and she seemed like a different person...
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Lan was on the one to give Little Dog his name. She named herself and her...
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...as the mind. Trauma hits the muscles and joints, and it is reflected in posture. Lan was practically bent in half, Little Dog says. Once, on the Fourth of July, Rose...
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One of Little Dog’s chores as a child was to pluck the grey hairs from Lan’s head. “For this work,” Little Dog says, “I was paid in stories.” She told him...
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Some say history is circular, Little Dog claims, and that is how Lan’s stories moved. Sometimes, her stories would change slightly—colors, the number of air raids that day,...
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...the Vietnamese, love is expressed in service, not words. That night with the mood rings, Lan and Rose kept asking Little Dog if they were happy. He told them they were,...
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...about, is tied to the table. The woman says in Vietnamese that her name is Lan. The word means “orchid” in Vietnamese, and she gave herself the name at 17 after...
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...Dog says, that it will cure impotence. On the dirt road, stopped by the soldiers, Lan’s bladder releases. The brain of a macaque, Little Dog says, “is the closest, of any...
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“No bang bang,” Lan says to the soldiers. Macaque monkeys have introspective thoughts, Little Dog says, and they even...
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...nine years old and in Virginia, and the man is his grandfather, Paul. Paul and Lan met in Saigon in 1967, where he was stationed with the US Navy. They were...
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One day while plucking Lan’s grey hairs, Lan told Little Dog that she worked as a prostitute during the war....
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...dinner. “Ca trù,” Little Dog says. “Do you remember it, Ma,” Little Dog interrupts, “how Lan would sing it out of nowhere?” Little Dog remembers that Paul can speak Vietnamese and...
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...never understand why announcers on ESPN called Tiger Woods “black.” Tiger’s mother is Taiwanese, but Lan always thought he looked Puerto Rican. When Little Dog arrived in the United States with...
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...was a half-white girl in Go Chang, who was called “ghost-girl” by everyone she knew. Lan was called “a traitor and a whore for sleeping with the enemy,” and when Rose...
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...he must be in Rose’s rusty Toyota. “He’s gonna kill her, Ma,” she says to Lan, talking about sister, Mai. Mai’s boyfriend, Carl, has been known to beat her. The clock...
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...the door opens, and a man appears. He has a shotgun, and Little Dog and Lan begin to scream for Rose to get back in the car. The man advances and...
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Part 2
...the day instead of “Good morning.” When Little Dog is forced to miss work because Lan has a schizophrenic attack and tries to burn her clothes in the oven, Little Dog...
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...tree and sat. Suddenly, he heard footsteps on the leaves below, and then he heard Lan’s voice. “Little Dog,” Lan said into the darkness. “Your mom, [Rose]. She not normal okay?...
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Part 3
...produced in 1996. The “truest ruins,” Little Dogs says, “are not written down.” A girl Lan knew in Go Cong was “erased” just weeks before the war ended, and she is...
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Little Dog remembers watching television with Lan one afternoon and seeing a program in which a herd of buffalo follow each other...
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The room is quiet and still. Lan is on the floor on a mattress with Rose, Mai, and Little Dog by her...
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...only because he knows Duchamp was right, because that is exactly was has happened to Lan. In this new state, Lan is unrecognizable—she is someone else entirely. Little Dog has always...
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It is 10:00 in the morning when Lan begins to die. Mai points to Lan’s feet, which have turned a deep purple color....
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Lan has been dead for five months, but today, Rose and Little Dog are in Vietnam...
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...hears Paul blow his nose and begin to talk. Paul is sorry that he left Lan in ’71, he says. He was told his mother was sick, but it was just...
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Little Dog can remember the table and the fire (because Lan told him there was a fire in their Hartford apartment), and he can remember the...
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...there are monarchs nearby, getting ready to fly south. In Saigon, just two days after Lan’s burial, Little Dog wakes in the night to the sound of music and children laughing....
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...and fire burning at its edges. He can remember his first Thanksgiving—turkey, mash potatoes, and Lan’s eggrolls. Little Dog can remember is first year in American schools, when he took a...
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Little Dog remembers a room and a table. He remembers Lan singing and fire crawling up the walls. He remembers a family hiding beneath the table....
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