Hurting and Healing: The Immigrant Experience and the Birth of a Poet in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The paper considers Ocean Vuong’s critically acclaimed novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) as both a representation of the Vietnamese American immigrant experience and an experiment in narrative form. The main argument is that Vuong’s narrative style, based on uncertainty, fragmentation, and fluidity, reflects the idea of cultural identity as an ever-changing process constituted within representation. We align our reading of the novel with the contemporary considerations of American immigrant literature and Asian American literature and culture which highlight agency, re-storying, dealing with individual and collective traumas, disruption of the narrative flow and fluidity (as opposed to fixity), and contradiction. Vuong’s novel addresses all these issues while also discussing the racial, ethnic, sexual, and personal identities of Vietnamese immigrants in relation to their pre-American and American experiences. We argue that the main strength of the writer’s literary representation lies in his efforts to find a new language to express his own experience as well as the immigrant experience of his family. This is the language that emulates his grandmother’s storytelling style and defies the conventional narrative flow. Thus, the fragmentation, fluidity, and uncertainty of the narrative correspond with the fragmentation of memory, fluidity of one’s identity, and uncertainty of both one’s past and the future.