Affective Chemistries of Care: Slow Activism and the Limits of the Molecular in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

Abstract

Ocean Vuong’s 2019 debut novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (hereafter On Earth ) proceeds as a series of letters from the first-person narrator, Little Dog, to his mostly Vietnamese-speaking mother. 1 In these epistles, we learn of the storytelling prowess of both Ma (Rose) and Lan (Rose’s mother), and how the narrator’s own path toward becoming a writer stems from his vow, as a young refugee living in Connecticut, to help these two women—to have on his tongue the correct English words. 2 Also detailed are Little Dog’s teenage and early adult years, and his sense of becoming beautiful through the erotic gaze of a white boy, Trevor. The letters meditate on loss and grief, specifically of two persons whose deaths are recounted in these missives: Trevor, at age twenty-two, dies from a fentanyl overdose linked to his addiction to prescription opioids, and grandma Lan dies of advanced bone cancer.