On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Little Dog attempts to address what it means to be a writer. Seven of his friends are dead, four of whom died of opioid overdose. Trevor became addicted to OxyContin after a doctor prescribed it when he broke his ankle. His death is determined to be “an overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl” (178). He was 22 years old.

Little Dog recalls watching a movie with Lan where buffalo ran off a cliff in a heard. Little Dog explains that they were just following their family and did not know to stop. This reminds him of a local woman who advocated for putting up stop signs in the neighborhood. Both of her sons overdosed on fentanyl and died.

Little Dog writes, “I don’t want my sadness to be othered form me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered” (181). He thinks that the manic episodes having bipolar disorder are something he fought hard for. He thinks his sadness might be trying to teach him, “You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop” (182).

Little Dog never injected drugs because he is scared of needles. He remembers the second time Trevor overdosed. He remembers sitting with Trevor in an elementary school playground as Trevor shot up. Trevor asked, “You think you’ll be really gay, like, forever?” (188). Trevor thought he would be straight in a few years.

To Little Dog, writing means “getting down so low the world offers a merciful new angle, a larger vision of small things” (189), to gain new perspective and capture the meaning of the trials and traumas of life. 

Lan is dying. Stretched out on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by Rose, Mai, and Little Dog, the “only indication that she’s alive is her favorite yellow blanket, now grey, rising and falling on her chest” (195). After lying in the same spot for two weeks, Lan developed bedsores. Lan tells Rose that she feels like a hut on fire. Lan was diagnosed with stage four bone cancer. The diagnosis filled Little Dog with a burning anger. Lan does not believe that she is dying. Rose and Mai attend to their mother’s failing body.

Little Dog’s mind moves to the first time he and Trevor actually had sex. It was in September of Little Dog’s second season at the farm. It is an intensely painful experience for Little Dog. Little Dog’s bowels give out, and he defecates. He is worried that Trevor’s American masculinity will turn him against him. Trevor tells him to get up, but Little Dog misheard. They go down to the river to clean up. To prove his feelings for Little Dog have not been marred by the incident, Trevor performs oral sex on him, kneeling in the mud of the river.

At ten in the morning, Mai alerts Rose and Little Dog that Lan is dying. Mai points out that Lan’s feet have turned purple, though to Little Dog they look “black, burnished brown at the tips of the toes” (207). The comparison to the color purple makes him think of the time he picked small purple flowers at Lan’s request, risking injury by climbing a fence.

Lan requests a bite of rice from her village, Go Cong. Because this is impossible, Mai makes regular rice; this satisfies Lan. She dies two hours later. Little Dog watches Mai and Rose preside over the body. Rose tries to insert Lan’s dentures, but it takes two tries: her rigor mortis inflicted jaws reject them.  

Five months after Lan’s death, she has a Buddhist funeral in Go Cong. Little Dog calls Paul, who asks to see Lan’s gravestone. Little Dog shows him through his laptop’s webcam. He hears Paul apologizing to Lan’s picture. His mother feigned illness to recall him from Vietnam, and his brother intercepted all letters that Lan wrote him. By the time Lan, Rose, and Little Dog made it to the United States, Paul had been married to another woman for eight years. He apologizes in broken Vietnamese, which he still retains.

Little Dog and Rose return to their Saigon hotel room. Rose turns out all the lights and asks where she is. Not knowing what to do, Little Dog says her name and touches her shoulder.

Little Dog describes Hartford, a rough town, where people greet each other “by asking, our chins jabbing the air, ‘What’s good?’” and where “grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and ba ngoais were kings” (212-213).

Little Dog and Rose visit Paul to celebrate Little Dog’s college graduation. In Paul’s garden, Little Dog remembers his father bringing home his meagre wages from the fish market. He remembers going to the market with Rose to buy food with the money his father brought home. His father “had only beaten [Rose] twice—which meant there was still hope it would be the last” (221).

Back at the hotel in Saigon, Little Dog hears music. Stepping out into the night, a vibrant scene greets him, reminiscent of a festival. The music is coming from performers in drag. Little Dog discovers that the “festival” is actually a funeral, “a common scene on a Saigon night” (226-27). The drag queens are hired for such events in order to provide some surreal levity.

Little Dog remembers getting in trouble in school for coloring a photocopy of a cow rainbow instead of normal colors. At the vibrant funeral in Saigon, he begins to cry. A middle-aged man, thinking he is mourning the subject of the funeral, reassures him.

Little Dog remembers his first Thanksgiving. His friend Junior invited him to his house. Lan gave him a plate of eggrolls to bring; Junior’s family enjoyed them. An Etta James record played; Little Dog linked her singing to Vietnamese lullabies.

Little Dog reflects that Paul “is not my grandfather by blood—but by action. Paul played trumpet to escape from his abusive father. He enlisted to get even further away. In Paul’s garden, Rose shows Little Dog a swarming colony of ants. Then, they go inside and set the table for dinner.

Little Dog wakes up to the sound of an animal wailing in the fields. He is 15 years old; Trevor sleeps beside him in Buford’s barn. Little Dog searches for the source of the sound.

Little Dog had asked Trevor about the buffaloes he and Lan watched on the Discovery Chanel the week before. Trevor said that running off the cliff is not up to the buffaloes; it is the law of nature. Trevor asked Little Dog, “what were you before you met me?” (237). Little Dog said he was drowning; now he was water.

Little Dog walks through tobacco fields, contemplating the nature of beauty and the finitude of human life as the sun rises. He thinks the animal wailing might be a heifer whose offspring was taken from it. He steps into the clearing where the cow is.

There is no cow in the clearing. Little Dog wonders, “The heifer, the farm, the boy, the wreck, the war—had I made it all up, in a dream, only to wake up with it fused to my skin?” (240).

Little Dog begins to run, “thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living” (241). He thinks of buffaloes, moose, macaques, and monarch butterflies. He tries to outrun himself, “until what I left behind becomes exactly what I’m running toward—like I’m part of a family” (242).

Little Dog asks his exhausted mother to tell the story of the Monkey King. He says that Rose is a monkey, because she was born in the year of the monkey. Rose tells Little Dog that she was not caught because she is like a monkey, and some monkeys are hard to catch. For no reason, she starts to laugh.

Little Dog wonders how far Rose got in his letter. He hopes reincarnation is real; in an alternate life, she might find this book and read the story of their family.