On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

by

Ocean Vuong

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous makes teaching easy.

Little Dog Character Analysis

Rose’s son, Lan’s grandson, Trevor’s friend and lover, and the narrator of On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous. The novel consists of Little Dog’s letter to Rose, in which he recounts their lives via his own memories and stories told to him by others. Little Dog is born in Vietnam, but he immigrates to the United States with his family after fleeing to the Philippines as refugees in 1990. Little Dog is just a boy when he arrives in Hartford, Connecticut, where the American children bully him and slap him around. “Speak English,” they say, calling him names like “fruit” and a “pansy.” Little Dog’s trouble with the neighborhood kids only gets worse when Rose buys him a hot-pink bicycle, after which he quickly learns how important color is in America. Little Dog’s childhood is further complicated by Rose’s posttraumatic stress disorder related to the Vietnam War and her tendency to violently abuse him. Little Dog also writes about his relationship with Trevor, but he only has the courage to do so because he knows Rose will probably never read his letter. To Little Dog, Trevor is the personification of traditional American masculinity, and he is everything that Little Dog will never be. Like Rose, Little Dog lives with mental illness, and his bipolar disorder, according to Little Dog, likely predisposes him to the drug addiction he struggles with after meeting Trevor. Little Dog is devastated after Trevor’s overdose and death, and he is equally heartbroken by Lan’s death at the end of the novel. Little Dog’s letter to his mother represents his attempt to connect with her in a meaningful and lasting way. Through it he also hopes to come to terms with all the things that make him both “other” and beautiful—his Vietnamese identity, his sexuality, and his struggle with mental illness and addiction.

Little Dog Quotes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous quotes below are all either spoken by Little Dog or refer to Little Dog. 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:
War, Trauma, and Abuse  Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, "Boom!" You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’m sorry,” you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. “Grab your coat. I’ll get you McDonald’s.” Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. “You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?”

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. “Do I look like a real American?” you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan
Related Symbols: Monarch Butterflies
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

“You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going You have a bellyful of English. […] You have to use it, okay?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue it to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 31-32
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan, Paul
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2 Quotes

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, bur insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pals, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 91-92
Explanation and Analysis:

Afterward, lying next to me with his face turned away, he cried skillfully in the dark. The way boys do. The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:

“I can’t. I just—I mean…” He spoke into the wall. “I dunno. I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t man. I’m sorry, it’s not for me—“He paused, wiped his nose. “It’s for you. Right?”

Related Characters: Trevor (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t like girls.”

I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it—pê-đê—from the French pédé, short for pédéraste. Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“Tell me,” you sat up, a concerned look on your face, “when did all this start? I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy. I know that. When?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

A few months before our talk at Dunkin' Donuts, a fourteen-year-old boy in rural Vietnam had acid thrown in his face after he slipped a love letter into another boy's locker. Last summer, twenty-eight-year-old Florida native Omar Mateen walked into an Orlando nightclub, raised his automatic rifle, and opened fire. Forty-nine people were killed. It was a gay club and the boys, because that's who they were—sons, teenagers—looked like me: a colored thing born of one mother, rummaging the dark, each other, for happiness.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

I don’t wanna, he said. His panting. His shaking hair. The blur of it. Please tell me I am not, he said through the sound of his knuckles as he popped them like the word But But But. And you take a step back. Please tell me I am not, he said, I am not

a faggot. Am I? Am I? Are you?

Trevor the hunter. Trevor the carnivore, the redneck, not

A pansy, shotgunner, sharpshooter, not fruit or fairy. Trevor meateater but not

veal. Never veal. Fuck that, never again after his daddy told him the story when he was seven, at the table, veal roasted with rosemary. How they were made. How the difference between veal and beef is the children. The veal are children.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor (speaker), Trevor’s Father
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

Trevor was into The Shawshank Redemption and Jolly Ranchers, Call of Duty and his one-eyed border collie, Mandy. Trevor who, after an asthma attack, said, hunched over and gasping, "I think I just deep-throated an invisible cock," and we both cracked up like it wasn't December and we weren't under an overpass waiting out the rain on the way home from the needle exchange. Trevor was a boy who had a name, who wanted to go to community college to study physical therapy. Trevor was alone in his room when he died, surrounded by posters of Led Zeppelin. Trevor was twenty-two. Trevor was.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor
Page Number: 178
Explanation and Analysis:

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."

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor (speaker), Lan (speaker), Kyle (speaker), Kevin (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Buffalo
Page Number: 179-180
Explanation and Analysis:

I never did heroin because I’m chicken about needles. When I declined his offer to shoot it, Trevor, tightening the cell phone charger around his arm with his teeth, nodded toward my feet. "Looks like you dropped your tampon." Then he winked, smiled—and faded back into the dream he made of himself.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor
Page Number: 182
Explanation and Analysis:

"Is it true though?" His swing kept creaking. "You think you'll be really gay, like, forever? I mean," the swing stopped, "I think me . . . I’ll be good in a few years, you know?"

I couldn't tell if by "really" he meant very gay or truly gay.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor (speaker)
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous LitChart as a printable PDF.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous PDF

Little Dog Quotes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous quotes below are all either spoken by Little Dog or refer to Little Dog. 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:
War, Trauma, and Abuse  Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, "Boom!" You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’m sorry,” you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. “Grab your coat. I’ll get you McDonald’s.” Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. “You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?”

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. “Do I look like a real American?” you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan
Related Symbols: Monarch Butterflies
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

“You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going You have a bellyful of English. […] You have to use it, okay?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue it to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 31-32
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan, Paul
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2 Quotes

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, bur insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pals, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 91-92
Explanation and Analysis:

Afterward, lying next to me with his face turned away, he cried skillfully in the dark. The way boys do. The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:

“I can’t. I just—I mean…” He spoke into the wall. “I dunno. I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t man. I’m sorry, it’s not for me—“He paused, wiped his nose. “It’s for you. Right?”

Related Characters: Trevor (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t like girls.”

I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it—pê-đê—from the French pédé, short for pédéraste. Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“Tell me,” you sat up, a concerned look on your face, “when did all this start? I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy. I know that. When?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

A few months before our talk at Dunkin' Donuts, a fourteen-year-old boy in rural Vietnam had acid thrown in his face after he slipped a love letter into another boy's locker. Last summer, twenty-eight-year-old Florida native Omar Mateen walked into an Orlando nightclub, raised his automatic rifle, and opened fire. Forty-nine people were killed. It was a gay club and the boys, because that's who they were—sons, teenagers—looked like me: a colored thing born of one mother, rummaging the dark, each other, for happiness.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

I don’t wanna, he said. His panting. His shaking hair. The blur of it. Please tell me I am not, he said through the sound of his knuckles as he popped them like the word But But But. And you take a step back. Please tell me I am not, he said, I am not

a faggot. Am I? Am I? Are you?

Trevor the hunter. Trevor the carnivore, the redneck, not

A pansy, shotgunner, sharpshooter, not fruit or fairy. Trevor meateater but not

veal. Never veal. Fuck that, never again after his daddy told him the story when he was seven, at the table, veal roasted with rosemary. How they were made. How the difference between veal and beef is the children. The veal are children.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor (speaker), Trevor’s Father
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

Trevor was into The Shawshank Redemption and Jolly Ranchers, Call of Duty and his one-eyed border collie, Mandy. Trevor who, after an asthma attack, said, hunched over and gasping, "I think I just deep-throated an invisible cock," and we both cracked up like it wasn't December and we weren't under an overpass waiting out the rain on the way home from the needle exchange. Trevor was a boy who had a name, who wanted to go to community college to study physical therapy. Trevor was alone in his room when he died, surrounded by posters of Led Zeppelin. Trevor was twenty-two. Trevor was.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor
Page Number: 178
Explanation and Analysis:

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."

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor (speaker), Lan (speaker), Kyle (speaker), Kevin (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Buffalo
Page Number: 179-180
Explanation and Analysis:

I never did heroin because I’m chicken about needles. When I declined his offer to shoot it, Trevor, tightening the cell phone charger around his arm with his teeth, nodded toward my feet. "Looks like you dropped your tampon." Then he winked, smiled—and faded back into the dream he made of himself.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor
Page Number: 182
Explanation and Analysis:

"Is it true though?" His swing kept creaking. "You think you'll be really gay, like, forever? I mean," the swing stopped, "I think me . . . I’ll be good in a few years, you know?"

I couldn't tell if by "really" he meant very gay or truly gay.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Trevor (speaker)
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis: