On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: Part 1 Summary & Analysis

Little Dog begins again. “Dear Ma,” he writes. Little Dog is writing a letter to his mother, Rose, to go back in time. He wants to go back to the time in Virginia, when Rose was shocked to see a taxidermy head of a deer hanging near the bathroom of a rest stop. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to hang a corpse on the wall. She thought it was like “death that won’t finish.” Little Dog is writing, he says, because he was always told never to begin a sentence with “because.” But Little Dog isn’t really trying to write a sentence; he is “trying to break free.”

During the fall in Michigan, thousands of monarch butterflies begin their seasonal migration. From September through November, butterflies from Canada and the United States fly to Mexico for the winter. During this time, butterflies are everywhere—on cars, buildings, and clotheslines. One night of cold is enough to kill an entire generation of monarchs, Little Dog writes, so their survival depends on the right “timing."

When Little Dog was just five years old, he hid behind a doorway in the hall to prank Rose. “Boom!” he shouted, jumping out at her. She screamed, her “face raked and twisted,” and grabbed at her chest. “I didn’t know that the war was still inside you,” Little Dog says to his mother, “that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes.” In the third grade, Little Dog read a book called Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. His ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, Mrs. Callahan, helped him. She stood behind him, whispering the words into his ear.

The first time Rose hit Little Dog, he was just four years old. “A hand, a flash, a reckoning,” he recalls. Another time, Little Dog tried to teach Rose to read like Mrs. Callahan taught him; however, this reversed their roles as mother and son, which were already strained, and Rose grew impatient. “I don’t need to read,” she said, slamming the book closed. There was also the time she hit him with the remote control, leaving a welt on his arm. Little Dog told his teacher he fell during tag.

When Rose was 46, she was struck by a sudden urge to color, so she went to Wal-Mart and bought crayons and coloring books. She colored countless pictures and hung them around the house. There was also the time, Little Dog remembers, when Rose threw a Lego box at his head, and his blood spotted the floor. While coloring a landscape, Rose asked Little Dog if he “ever made a scene” and put himself inside it. “How could I tell you what you were describing was writing?” Little Dog asks her. After Rose bandaged Little Dog’s head, she apologized and took him to McDonald’s. “You have to get bigger and stronger,” she said as he ate his chicken nuggets.

Little Dog read Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary again yesterday and decided to write to Rose. “You who are still alive,” Little Dog says. He remembers Saturdays growing up in Hartford. If there was enough money after paying the bills, Rose and Little Dog would dress up and go to the mall off the interstate. They would buy gourmet chocolates and walk around until closing and then go home emptyhanded. One morning, Little Dog looked out his window before the sunrise and saw a deer in the fog. There was a second deer nearby that looked almost like a shadow. He wishes Rose could color that scene. She could call it: “The History of Memory.” 

Once with a gallon of milk, Little Dog recounts, Rose struck him and milk spilled to the floor. Years ago at Six Flags, Rose rode the Superman rollercoaster with him, and then she threw up in a garbage can. “I forgot to say Thank you,” Little Dog writes. Once in Goodwill, Rose tried on a dress for her birthday. “Do I look like a real American?” she asked. The dress was too fancy for her to have a reason to wear it. But, Little Dog says, there was “a possibility of use.” Once, in the kitchen, Rose picked up a knife, shaking. “Get out. Get out,” she said to Little Dog. He ran.

Little Dog is 28 years old. He stands five feet, four inches tall, and he weighs 112 pounds. He is writing to Rose from a body that used to be hers. “Which is to say,” Little Dog says, “I am writing as a son.” He hopes to begin at “the end of the sentence,” where there is “another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron.” According to Little Dog, that is the part of the story that really matters.

Little Dog was 13 when he told Rose to stop hitting him. “Stop, Ma. Quit it,” he said. “Please.” She said nothing and left to get eggs, but Little Dog knew she would never hit him again. Surviving monarchs pass messages to their children, Little Dog writes, and memory is “woven into their genes.” He wonders when a war truly ends and asks Rose when the meaning of her name will not include what she left behind. “I’m not a monster,” she once said to him, “I’m a mother.” Little Dog reassured her and said she wasn’t a monster. “But I lied,” he says

The truth is, Little Dog says, being a monster isn’t so bad. The word comes from the Latin monstrum and was adapted by Old French. The word is “a hybrid signal,” and can mean many things. Little Dog thinks about Rose’s childhood in Vietnam and says that he once read that parents with PTSD have a greater tendency to hit their kids. At the Goodwill, when Rose tried on the dress, she asked Little Dog if it was fireproof. He lied again and said it was, and she bought it. The next day, when Rose was at work, he tried the dress on, trying to be more like her. At school, the kids called him “freak, fairy, fag,” and those words, Little Dog points out, are “also iterations of monster.” 

Little Dog claims that he explained how he became a writer in an earlier draft of the letter, but he has since erased it. He decided how he became a writer doesn’t matter; what matters is what he writes now. Everything he has done before has brought him to this page—to 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 when she slept. Awake, she was scattered, a product of her schizophrenia, which was made much worse by the war. But sleeping, Little Dog says, Nan was silent.

Lan was on the one to give Little Dog his name. She named herself and her daughter, Rose, after flowers; however, she named him after a dog. In Vietnam, the smallest children are often named after “despicable things.” Evil spirits take healthy and beautiful children, and a threatening name keeps the spirits away. To love someone, Little Dog says, is to name them something terrible so they are left alone. The name becomes a “shield.”

According to Little Dog, trauma affects the body as well 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 woke from a sleep when the neighbors let off some fireworks. She crawled to Little Dog and covered his mouth. “Shhh. If you scream,” she said, “the mortars will know where we are.” At times, Lan didn’t even seem to notice sound, Little Dog remembers. They once heard distant gunshots in Hartford (not an unusual sound), and Rose dropped to the floor. “What?” Lan said. “It’s only three shots.”

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 stories of the war, of their Vietnamese culture and history, and of their family. She told him about Rose’s father, an American serviceman she met in Saigon while wearing her purple dress. Living during the war, it was Lan’s “body, her purple dress, that kept her alive,” Little Dog writes. 

Little Dog remembers the school bus, on which no one ever sat next to him. The boys gave him a hard time and shoved him into the window glass. “Speak English,” a boy named Kyle said. He slapped Little Dog and made him say his name, and when Little Dog told Rose about it later that night, she slapped him, too. “You have to find a way, Little Dog,” she said. “You have to be a real boy and be strong.” The next day when Little Dog left for school, she called him “Superman.”

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, if Rose was laughing or crying—bur for the most part, her stories stayed the same. “[T]he truth is,” Little Dog says, “I don’t know, Ma.” He knows lots of “theories” that he writes and then deletes. “What’s your theory,” Little Dog asks Rose, “about anything?” Little Dog knows Rose will say she doesn’t know any and that theories are for those with too much time on their hands.

Rose has more money than words, Little Dog says. She once saw a hummingbird and said: “Ðẹp quá!” Little Dog said it was “beautiful” because that was the only word he had, but she didn’t understand. He remembers when he went with Rose to the butcher to get an oxtail. She told the butcher in Vietnamese what she wanted, but he didn’t understand. Rose tried speaking the bit of French she still remembered from childhood, so the butcher went in the back and returned with another man who spoke Spanish. Rose told Little Dog to tell them what she wanted, but he didn’t know that oxtail was called oxtail. They bought only a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise and left. Their words were wrong everywhere, Little Dog says, “even in their mouths.”

When she was a girl, Rose watched her school burn in a napalm raid, and she never went back to school again. To speak Vietnamese, Little Dog says, “is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.” He remembers when Rose worked at the clock factory, and he had to call her boss to get her hours cut. She was too tired, Little Dog told him. Little Dog even called the number on the Victoria’s Secret catalogue to order Rose’s bras and underwear. “I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma,” Little Dog writes. “I never asked.”

Little Dog and Rose didn’t buy oxtail that day, Little Dog remembers, but they did buy mood rings. According to Barthes, two languages cancel each other out and become a third. The “hand,” Little Dog says, is the “third language that animates where the tongue falters.” The Vietnamese rarely say “I love you,” and when they do, Little Dog says, they say it in English. For 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, which, Little Dog says, made them happy.

Vietnam is beautiful country, Little Dog says, “depending on where you look.” A woman, nearly 30, stands holding her daughter on a country road, when two soldiers with M-16s approach her. “A woman, a girl, a gun,” Little Dog says. “This is an old story, one anyone can tell.” It starts to rain. Vietnam is a beautiful country, Little Dog says again, “depending on who you are.” An airplane flies overhead, and the soldier raises his M-16, his finger on the trigger.

A door opens, and a macaque monkey is walked into a room. The animal, having been fed vodka and morphine all day, stumbles a bit. On the dirt road, the woman stares at the soldier, and he pushes her back with his gun. The monkey is led under the table, and its head is guided into a hole cut in the middle. The monkey, squirming 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 leaving an arranged marriage.

In Southeast Asia, Little Dog says, macaques are the most hunted primate. In the room, a man will soon cut the macaque’s skull open, and the men will eat the animal’s brain, as it struggles below the table, dipped in alcohol and garlic. They believe, Little 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 mammal, to a human’s.”

“No bang bang,” Lan says to the soldiers. Macaque monkeys have introspective thoughts, Little Dog says, and they even doubt themselves. They can recall the past and are capable of problem solving. “In other words,” Little Dog says, “macaques employ memory in order to survive.” When the monkey’s brain is gone, and the men eat the last of its memories, the monkey dies. The soldiers step back and allows Lan to pass the checkpoint. “[T]he year is 1968,” Little Dog says, “the Year of the Monkey.”

Little Dog wakes to the sound of a distressed animal. He sits up in bed and listens. He gets up and walks down the hall, at the end of which is a slightly opened door. There is light coming from the crack in the door, so Little Dog moves closer. He can see the old while man sitting in the chair, and Little Dog knows exactly where he is. He is 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 married a year later, and throughout Little Dog’s childhood, Paul and Lan’s wedding picture hung on Paul’s wall in Virginia.

One day while plucking Lan’s grey hairs, Lan told Little Dog that she worked as a prostitute during the war. She had to feed Rose, Lan said, and she had little choice. She had a windowless room she rented in Saigon where she took the men. “Shhhh,” Lan said to Little Dog. “Don’t tell your mom.” Paul and Lan met in a bar and immediately fell in love. Two months later, they were together in their Saigon apartment during the Tet Offensive. Paul spent all night shielding Lan, with his 9mm pistol aimed at the door, as the city fell down around them.

It is three in the morning as Little Dog crosses the room to Paul. Little Dog asks his grandfather if he is okay, and Paul says he was just thinking about the song Little Dog sang after 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 apologizes. Paul smiles and tells Little Dog that he is glad he is visiting.

As a child, Little Dog could 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 Rose and Lan in 1990, color was a pretty big deal. Lan, who was considered dark in Vietnam was now considered light, and Rose’s skin was so light, she could nearly “pass” for white. Tiger Woods’s father met his mother in Thailand when he was stationed there during Vietnam. They married in 1969 and moved to Brooklyn, but Tiger’s father returned to Vietnam for another tour in 1970. Tiger’s real name is Eldrick Woods, Little Dog says, and he is “a direct product of the war in Vietnam.” 

Paul and Little Dog are in the garden harvesting basil for a pesto sauce. Back in the kitchen, Paul pours Little Dog a bowl of Raisin Bran and picks up a joint. Paul was diagnosed with cancer three years ago due to exposure to Agent Orange. He is in remission now, but he still smokes pot. Little Dog remembers when Rose came to his room, smoking a cigarette. “He’s not your grandfather,” Rose said, “Okay?” Rose’s real father was just an “American john,” and she never knew him. “Everything good is somewhere else, baby,” Rose said to Little Dog, “I’m telling you. Everything.” Paul looks to Little Dog now. “Hey,” Paul says, “I’m not who I am. I mean…”

Little Dog remembers the first time Rose took him to church. They were the only “yellow” people there, but the song the congregation sang that day helped Little Dog to understand his mother. As the church sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” Rose put her head back and closed her eyes. “Where are you, Ba?” she yelled in Vietnamese. The church was so loud and full of singing and shouting to the lord that no one noticed Rose but Little Dog. In the church, Rose was able to express herself openly without judgement. The next day, Rose found a tape of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and she listened to it over and over again as she practiced manicuring techniques on mannequin hands. The mannequin hands were “pink and beige,” Little Dog says, “the only shades they came in.”  

In 1964, General Curtis LeMay of the U.S. Air Force said he was going to bomb the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Ages.” So, Little Dog says, to destroy someone is “to set them back in time.” In 1997, Tiger Woods won the Masters Tournament, and in 1998, Vietnam opened the country’s first golf course. One of the holes, Little Dog claims, is an old bomb crater.

As Paul talks, Little Dog fights the urge to tell him everything. He wants to tell Paul that Rose, “his daughter who is not his daughter,” 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 walked down the street, people threw buffalo feces at her “to make her brown again, as if to be born lighter was a wrong that could be reversed.” Paul says that maybe Little Dog shouldn’t call him “Grandpa” anymore, but Little Dog doesn’t have another grandpa, so he says he prefers to continue. Paul agrees, and Little Dog looks to his cereal, which has become a soggy mess. 

There is so much Little Dog wants to tell Rose, but what he wants to say is stuck behind a bunch of “syntax and semantics.” Little Dog doesn’t know exactly what he is trying to say. Sometimes he doesn’t even know who he is. He feels more like a sound. “Can you hear me yet?” Little Dog asks. “Can you read me?” When Little Dog first starting writing, he couldn’t stand how uncertain he was. He started every sentence “with maybe and perhaps,” and he always wrote “I think” or “I believe.” He wasn’t sure about anything. Similarly, he isn’t sure what to call Rose now. “White, Asian, orphan, American, mother?” Little Dog asks.

At times, Little Dog says, there are limited choices to choose from, like in an article he read from an 1894 printing of the El Paso Daily Times. A white man was arrested and accused of killing a Chinese man, but the judge let him go. According to Texas law, the murder of a human being was defined as the killing of a white man, an African American, or a Mexican. Since the Chinese man was none of those things, he wasn’t considered “human.”

As a girl in Vietnam, Little Dog says, children would try to scrape of Rose’s skin with a spoon. “Get the white off her,” they said. “Get the white off her!” When Tiger Woods is asked to describe himself, he says he is “Cablinasian,” because he is a combination of Chinese, Thai, Black, Dutch, and Native American. “To be or not to be. That is the question,” Little Dog says. “A question, yes, but not a choice.” 

Paul tells Little Dog about the time Paul visited them in Hartford, Connecticut. When Paul got there, he found Little Dog crying. Little Dog told Paul that the other kids “lived more,” and Paul began to laugh. Little Dog was just five years old, Paul says. Later that night, Paul and Little Dog take Paul’s dog for a walk, and a neighbor woman stops them to say hello. She comments that Paul has finally found someone to walk his dog. “Welcome. To. The. Neighbor. Hood,” she says to Little Dog. “This is my grandson,” Paul says to her. “Please remember that.”

Little Dog is pulled into a dark space by two women, and until Rose screams, he has no idea who they are or where he is. He feels movement, and knows 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 says 3:14, and Little Dog thinks that both his mother and his grandmother have gone insane. Rose speeds down the street and comes to a stop in front of a house. She gets out, ordering Little Dog and Lan to stay in the car.

“Come out, Carl,” Rose screams in Vietnamese, banging on the door with the wood butt of a machete. “Come out, you fucker!” Suddenly, 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 kicks the machete out of Rose’s hand. Lan and Little Dog continue yelling, and Rose finally gets back into the car. Mai isn’t there, she says, and neither is Carl. Lan tells Rose that Mai hasn’t lived in the house for five years. “We go home,” Lan says. “You need sleep, Rose.”