Ocean Vuong
04/2020
Despair LGBTQ Asian-American Love Drugs War Immigrant
The cruelest walls are made of glass (24)
It's true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane's turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now–as Lan called to me, "Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother." And we knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense–that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family (33)
"I'm not what your momma says I am." His gaze is lowered as he tells it, his rhythm cut with odd pauses, at times slipping into near-whisper, like a man cleaning his rifle at daybreak and talking to himself. And I let him run his mind. I let him empty. I didn't stop him because you don't stop nothing when you're nine (56)
Where no one asked them why they rolled their r's or where they really came from (58)
Days later, I would hear "His Eye is on the Sparrow" coming from the kitchen. You were at the table, practicing your manicurist techniques on rubber mannequin hands. Dionne had given you a tape of gospel music, and you hummed along as you worked, as the disembodied hands, their fingers lustered with candy colors, sprouted along the kitchen counters, their palms open, like the ones back in that church. But unlike the darker hands in the Ramirezes' congregation, the ones in your kitchen were pink and beige, the only shades they came in (60)
I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but sometimes things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it (62)
When I first started writing I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ides, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I knowsomething to be as true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I'm breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else–where, exactly, I'm not sure. Just as I don't know what to call you– White, Asian, orphan, American, mother? (62)
If you were god you would tell them to stop clapping. You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on. But you are not a god (76)
Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears (77)
At the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but 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. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat (92)
I could feel his eyes as I returned to my bike. And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of (96)
I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already inside us (120)
Then I heard the laughter. It came from a house on a street behind us. The clear voices of children, two, maybe three, then a man's–a father? They were playing in the backyard. Not a game, exactly, but an embodiment of vague excitement, the kind known only to very young children, where delight rushes through them simply by running across an empty field not yet recognized as a backyard in a shitty part of town (124)
"Many men, many, many, many, many men." We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it's also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves. "Wish death 'pon me. Lord I don't cry no more, don't look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me." In the blue living rooms we passed, the football game was dying down "Blood in my eye dawg and I can't see." In the blue living rooms, some people won and some people lost. In this way, autumn passed (125)
I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it's a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases–a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw–is, in itself, replication–the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist. And, yes, it was not pizza bagels, all those years ago, that I wanted from Gramoz, but replication. Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to (139)
"Fuck Coca-Cola" "Yeah, Sprite for life, fuckers," I added, not knowing then what I know now: that Coca-Cola and Sprite were the made by the same damn company. That no matter who you are or what you love of where you stand, it was always Coca-Cola in the end (151)
"You should stay," he says, gazing out across the lot, his face smeared with motor oil from his shift at the Pennzoil in Hebron. But we both know I'm leaving. I'm going to New York, to college. The whole point of us meeting was to say goodbye, or rather, just to be side by side, a farewell of presence, of proximity, the way men are supposed to (168)
Are you there? Are you still walking? They say nothing lasts forever and I'm writing you in the voice of an endangered species. The truth is I'm worried they will get us before they get us. Tell me where it hurts. You have my word (176)
"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. "I think so," I said, not knowing what I meant. "That's crazy." He laughed, the fake one you use to test the thickness of a silence. His shoulders wilted, the drug running through him steady (188)
What have we become to each other if not what we've done to each other? (206)
I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, a Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That's what I was (206)
When someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. As a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. Neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called "delaying sadness". In Saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death–or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal. It's through the drag performers' explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. As much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is still a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens–in this way–are unicorns. Unicorns stamping in a graveyard (226)
To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted (238)
Jenny,
Thank you for lending me this book. I am better off having read it.
I think my main impressions are:
- The despair was intense
- His images of love and self legitimacy are profound
- He tells a story of Asian-American and oppressed existence
I have not read anything like it.
I mentioned to you that I thought the book was sad. Earlier in the year, I read it through to about page 100 and had to stop reading it because of how intensely hopeless it made me feel. I almost did not make it through the second time through. I think this next excerpt captures my feeling well, and was the point at which I almost put the book down the second time:
Then I heard the laughter. It came from a house on a street behind us. The clear voices of children, two, maybe three, then a man's–a father? They were playing in the backyard. Not a game, exactly, but an embodiment of vague excitement, the kind known only to very young children, where delight rushes through them simply by running across an empty field not yet recognized as a backyard in a shitty part of town (124)
I empathized deeply with the laughter. I experienced the delight (wonderful word), and then I was crushed by his words, world-view.
There are stories which I have read which are sad because of the nature of the story. African American lives, struggles with racism. But with this particular story it is the mode of retelling which is entirely heavy and dismal. I don't know if I'm actually able to articulate a difference here.
Where might my perceived despair come from? I think it comes from a "fuck it" attitude. An "it's all fucked" attitude. And I wouldn't try and conjecture that he was wrong, or that he is wrong for feeling that way. This is his life, and his experiences. I just do not experience my life with the same lens.
I think the thing that will stick with me the most are his images of self-affirmation through love and those around him. His own unsureness of his own existence, of anybody's existence. And his way that he feels rooted, created, affirmed, legitimized through those around him. Those who love him. Those and that which he loves.
This passage about being seen by Trevor captures it simply:
I could feel his eyes as I returned to my bike. And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of (96)
And this passage around the nature of beauty elaborates further:
I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it's a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases–a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw–is, in itself, replication–the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist. And, yes, it was not pizza bagels, all those years ago, that I wanted from Gramoz, but replication. Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to (139)
In both of these passages, he mentions his increased existence, because of the eyes and actions of another. His existence is confirmed.
He conveys a simple truth which I also believe: that our existence is grounded in the love of others. In a world which changes, is turbulent, harsh, and unforgiving, I feel safe knowing that I hold the love of others. I know that I am loved. And I love others as well, and so a web of sorts is created. A supporting structure that keeps each of us humans afloat.
And so, by writing this book about his mother, he attempts to cement her existence. The telling of the story so honestly and wholly that she deserves only love, as every honest, whole story of a person should. And through his representation of her, she exists. He can create this same existence that he felt through eyes on him, by expressing his words for another. The mother he loves, amidst all its nuance and complication.
While still on the topic of love, he also talks about a risk involved in this pattern of loving.
To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted (238)
As I become more comfortable with my need for love and to love, this is a fear that I regularly am confronted with.
Many men can be characterized as obfuscating their authentic, inner selves via common social structures (e.g, bro-talk about women, or common language around winning and success rather than tenderness and feeling). For me their is a fear with allowing myself to be seen. It makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Now that I think about it, it is probably that way with most people. Most people would rather not show their inner selves, because that is where you can really be hurt.
I also could continue to write about how I think it is a good book for capturing racial stereotypes in our beloved culture. The section on apologizing and demeaning oneself was really interesting.
At the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but 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. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat (92)
This actually gets at a broader notion of power structures, which is really the overarching theme of racism. It is why Bell Hooks speaks of many of these power structures as one combined mode of oppression:
I often use the phrase ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy' to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation's politics (The Will To Change, 17)
I only do what I can about these structures, and being educated into awareness of their existence. He captures beautifully an Asian American experience, which I empathize deeply with.
Lastly, he talks about war. This quote stopped me.
Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears (77)
Fucking America. Why do we have so many bullets here?
Please feel free to share your responses to this. I might imagine we will talk about a bit of it tomorrow.
Thanks again for the rec. And I am also very happy to had an excuse to write up my thoughts on a very good book.
Love, Brendan