“Fruit of Violence”: The Subaltern Refugee and the Intersection of Oppressions in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
This article examines Ocean Vuong’s semi-autobiographical
novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by focusing on how the oppressions of race, gender, class, and sexuality overlap for the Vietnamese
refugees and immigrants in America. Among many difficulties, many
Vietnamese lives are marked by the intergenerational transmission of
emotional pain, and it deterred parents from forming a healthy relationship with their offsprings. As a queer, second-generation Vietnamese
American writer, Vuong is raised in a toxic household since he is subjected to physical and emotional abuse of his war traumatized mother.
On Earth, written in epistolary form, offers a glimpse into the many-layered anxieties, insecurities of Vuong’s family and reveals how
the legacy of the Vietnam War still pervades their life in all spheres in
America. His narrative, “as a line of communication,” is a significant
step towards liberating the women in his family from the subaltern
status. Speaking from the terrain of otherness and rejecting castration
by the forces that victimized his mother and grandmother, Vuong also
proves that it is possible to transform the resentment he harbors into
something fruitful, and anger can be instrumental in reconciliation and
healing.
___
- Aguilar-San Juan, Karin. Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Bates, Karen Grigsby. “Nailing The American Dream, With Polish.”
Npr, June 14, 2012, www.npr.org/2012/06/14/154852394/
with-polish-vietnamese-immigrant-community-thrives.
- Didur, J. and Teresa Heffernan. “Revisiting the Subaltern in the New
Empire.” Cultural Studies, vol. 17, number 1, 2003, pp. 1-15,
DOI:10.1080/095023803200005078.
- Dunst Charles and Krishnadev Calamur. “Trump Moves to Deport
Vietnam War Refugees.” The Atlantic, Dec. 21, 2018,www.
theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/12/donald-trump-deport-vietnam-war-refugees/577993/
Espiritu, Yen Le. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). U of California P, 2014.
- ---. “All Men Are Not Created Equal: Asian Men in the U.S. History.”
Men’s Lives, edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A.
Messner, Allyn and Bacon, 2010.
- ---. “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon.’”
American Quarterly, vol. 58, number 2, June 2006, pp. 329-352,
Project Muse, doi.org/10.1353/aq.2006.0042.
- Gupta, Ruchira. The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader: As If Women
Matter. Rupa Publications, 2014.
- Hadley, Tessa. “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
review – portrait of the artist as a teenager.” The Guardian, 14
June 2019.
- Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford. Lawrence &
Wishart, 1990, pp.222-37.
- Kelly, Gail Paradise. Vietnam to America. Routledge, 2019.
Kibria, Nazlı. Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese
Americans. Princeton UP, 1993.
- Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. 3rd ed., Oxford University
Press, 2012.
- Maggio, J. “‘Can the Subaltern Be Heard?’: Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 32, no. 4, Sage Publications,
Inc., 2007, pp. 419–43, www.jstor.org/stable/40645229.
- Montero, Darrell. “Vietnamese Refugees in America: Toward a Theory of Spontaneous International Migration.” The International Migration Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 1979, www.jstor.org/stable/2545179.
Neumann, Birgit. “‘Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all –
but an orphan’: The Mother Tongue and Translation in Ocean
Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” Anglica, vol. 138,
no. 2, 2020, pp. 277-298, doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0023.
- “Ocean Vuong on War, Sexuality and Asian-American Identity.” YouTube, uploaded by Amanpour and Company, 24 December,
2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OZIwsk9cAM
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Harvard UP, 1999.
- ---. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Macmillan, 1988, pp. 24-28.
Tolentino, Jia. “Ocean Vuong’s Life Sentences.” The New Yorker, June
3, 2019.
- Voicu, Cristina-Georgiana. “Crossing Borders of Hybridity Beyond
Marginality and Identity.” Cultures in/of Transition, vol. 1, no.1,
2011, www.researchgate.net/publication/292507320_Crossing_
borders_of_hybridity_beyond_marginality_and_identity.
- Vuong, Ocean. “Be Bold: A Profile of Ocean Vuong.” Interview by
Roberto Gonzalez. FEATURE,6.12.19, www.pw.org/content/
be_bold_a_profile_of_ocean_vuong?article_page=1.
- ---. “Ocean Vuong Explores the Coming-of-Age of Queerness.” Interview by Mitchell Kuga. GQ, June 24, 2019, www.gq.com/story/ocean-vuong-interview.
“Fruit of Violence”: The Subaltern Refugee and the Intersection of Oppressions
in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
44
---. “Failing Better: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong.” Interview
by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 24,
2019, lareviewofbooks.org/article/failing-better-a-conversationwith-ocean-vuong/.
- ---. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin P, 2019.
- ---. “Ocean Vuong: ‘As a child I would ask: What’s napalm?’” Interview by Emma Brockes. The Guardian, 9 June 2019, www.
theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/09/ocean-vuong-on-earth-weare-briefly-gorgeous-interview.
- ---. “Inside the Book: Ocean Vuong (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous).” Youtube, uploaded by Penguin Random House, June 4,
2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNIo8E1ZKPM&t=24s.
- Winter Thomas. “Vietnam War.” American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia. Edited by Bret E. Carroll. Sage Publications,
2003.
- Zhou, Min and Carl L. Bankston, III. “Stradling Two Social Worlds:
The Experience of Vietnamese Refugee Children in the United
States.” Research Gate, Jan. 2000, www.researchgate.net/publication/234604776_Straddling_Two_Social_Worlds_The_Experience_of_Vietnamese_Refugee_Children_in_the_United_
States_Urban_Diversity_Series_No_111.