A wide range of readers have admired Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Both his first and his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (2025), have been translated into German as Auf Erden sind wir kurz grandios and Der Kaiser der Freude, respectively. In language of striking beauty and originality, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous tells the story of Little Dog, a 28-year-old gay, working-class Vietnamese-American writer, and the family members who made his life possible. Inspired by people who defy oppression by finding joy, he honors them by crafting poetry.
Vuong’s novel unwinds as a letter in which educated, bilingual Little Dog tries to show his mother, Rose—who can’t read or write—how he thinks and feels. The daughter of a Vietnamese sex worker (Lan) and an unknown white American soldier, Rose came to the U.S. as a refugee with her mother, her older sister Mai, Little Dog, and Little Dog’s abusive father. The family settled in working-class Hartford, Connecticut, where Rose worked in factories and nail salons. She never attended school past the age of five, but she often told stories, which fed Little Dog’s writing, artistically and politically. Near the end of the novel, Little Dog tells his mother (and his readers):
“They will tell you that great writing ‘breaks free’ from the political, thereby ‘transcending’ the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They’ll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let’s see how it’s made, they’ll say—as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.”[1]
It makes no sense to Little Dog that how authors write – how they develop their craft – can be distinguished from their reasons for writing. More than a metaphor, “craft” links the knowledge built by writers with expert handworkers’ experience. Respect for people who work with their hands varies culturally, and the concept of “how-to” knowledge built through experience makes some scholars uneasy. Undergraduate Creative Writing programs and Master of Fine Arts programs teach craft knowledge, which differs from but overlaps with the analysis taught by literary scholars.[2] Sociologist Richard Sennett has proposed that “all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices,” and architect Juhani Pallasmaa agrees that “in creative work, both the artist and craftsman are directly engaged with their bodies.”[3] Like carpentry, fiction-writing demands in-depth knowledge of one’s own and other people’s bodily capacities. Writing’s roots in sensations and actions bind it to the power relations that shape people’s language and daily lives.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous opens with a bodily metaphor as Little Dog tells his mother, “I am writing to reach you” (p. 3). But as the novel soon shows, Little Dog’s literary “hands” extend further: He wants to be seen, and he wants whole populations of misapprehended people and other living things to be perceived along with him. Recalling a Vietnamese girl who wore sandals made of tires and was “erased by an air strike,” he reflects that “the truest ruins are not written down” (p. 175). By writing, Little Dog hopes to depict lives unapproached by readers’ perceptions or imaginations. Literary scholar Elaine Scarry has observed that “the relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented also influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented.”[4] Little Dog senses that with his words, he is making everyone he describes imaginable and real. He seeks language “to give voice to those who have had no voice in American letters.”[5]
Even in the third decade of the twenty-first century, U. S. publishing “remains extraordinarily white, well above 90 percent, possibly above 97 percent.”[6] Based on research that combines literary and social science methods, Laura B. McGrath points toward causes in the U. S. publishing industry. Literary agents work as “gatekeepers,” identifying talented writers, preparing their work for submission, and presenting their fiction to editors.[7] In the U. S., “up to 80 percent of agents are white,” and because cultural differences can affect agents’ abilities to understand writers’ projects, “securing representation as a first step toward publication is a particular challenge for writers of color.”[8] Even when agents advocate for under-represented writers, editors can’t acquire their projects without “comparable” books to estimate sales. Because their fiction—like Vuong’s—is often as novel in its form as in its subject-matter, editors may fail to find “comps,” resulting in “a systematic discrimination against people of color in book acquisition.”[9] Little Dog, who has studied poetry in New York, seems to know the context in which he is writing.
To explain how and why he is writing, Little Dog develops an extended metaphor. Having offered chair-design as a challenge to pure “craft,” he compares writing to building a table. In Vuong’s novel, tables have multiple associations: Little Dog’s father beat his mother at a kitchen table; Little Dog imagines a table in the stories Lan tells him about the burning of her Vietnamese home; and as he considers how his craft works, a body lies on a table outside his window as part of a late-night Saigon funeral. Little Dog tells his mother,
“I remember the table, which is to say I am putting it together. Because someone opened their mouth and built a structure with words and now I am doing the same each time I see my hands and think table, think beginnings” (p. 222).
Raised by a woman who works with her hands, he depicts writing as handwork, suggesting how much he has learned from his mother’s labor, language, and stories. He continues,
“I remember running my fingers along the edges, studying the bolts and washers I created in my mind. I remember crawling underneath, checking for chewed gum, the names of lovers, but finding only bits of dried blood, splinters” (p. 222).
Mentally exploring his table from below, Little Dog subversively obeys his professors’ command to “see how it’s made.” He wants to know not just what supports its structure but what human traces lie hidden under its surface. Being a writer, he tells Rose, means “getting down so low the world offers a merciful new angle, a larger vision made of small things” (p. 189). His table metaphor provides just this perspective. People who are small—literally and metaphorically—see the world from a different angle and are likely to look under tables.
To help readers view the world from this angle, Vuong encourages them to imagine life in “small” bodies—not just Little Dog’s but Rose’s, Lan’s, and those of the people and other living creatures they encounter. He tells Rose, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work” (p. 175). His artistic skill and desire for justice work synergistically to make ignored, disrespected lives imaginable. Vuong’s craft calls to readers’ senses so that by sharing the sensations and movements of “small” people, they can imagine their feelings and thoughts.
To guide readers’ imaginations, Vuong has Little Dog reveal that at the time of writing, he is “twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4 in tall, 112 lbs” (p. 10).[10] Implanted early in the novel, this brief description seems crafted for readers other than Rose, who knows what her son looks like. As his protagonist longs to be seen, Vuong makes sure Little Dog is easy to visualize from the start. But in Vuong’s craft, vision rarely works alone. Many of his descriptions combine vision, movement, and touch to suggest Little Dog’s inner life. In a memory that resonates with his table metaphor, Little Dog recalls that after a neighbor’s house burned, he “lifted a piece of window frame, still warm, from the wreck, my fingers digging into the soft wood, damp from the hydrant” (p. 114). Literary scholar Anežka Kuzmičová has observed that an author can create a sense of presence in a story, even a “genuine flash of sensorimotor unity” in readers, by describing an environment through a long-range sense (such as vision), then showing a character interacting with it through a more intimate sense (such as exploratory touch).[11] Little Dog’s memory of the charred window (evoked by touching his lover, Trevor) works the opposite way, with tactile sensations suggesting sights and smells. These linked sensory cues collaborate to show Little Dog’s environment and inner life at once.
Touch plays a leading role in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, where family members show their love by tending each other’s bodies. Lan and Little Dog massage Rose to ease her cramps after a day’s work at the nail salon. Little Dog plucks Lan’s white hairs, and Lan rolls a boiled egg over Little Dog’s swollen cheek after Rose smashes a teapot against his face. Throughout Little Dog’s childhood, Rose physically abuses him, and Vuong invokes deep bodily sensations excluded from the traditional five senses to suggest Little Dog’s emotional responses to her cruelty.
When Little Dog is six, Rose locks him in the basement because he has wet his bed. Little Dog recounts the memory in an ironic passage crafted for his mother and other readers: “You know this story” (p. 97). Whether the reader is Rose or a sympathetic stranger, Little Dog invites them deep into his scared, wet body: “all around him the dank scent of damp earth, rusted pipes choked with cobwebs, his own piss, still wet down his leg, between his toes” (p. 98). Starting with smell, Vuong’s description zooms in, as though one could enter Little Dog’s body with his breath. The visual cues (rust, cobwebs) suggest how awful the basement would feel if touched, which Little Dog is trying to avoid. He can’t escape the greatest horror, the cooling wetness on his surface that has escaped from deep within. By taking readers into this small, frightened body, Vuong and Little Dog lead them down low, enabling them to broaden their own perceptions.
Helping readers view the world from a “merciful new angle” starts with Little Dog but extends to everything he imagines and perceives. As he grows, he increasingly senses the inner lives of people around him, not just Lan and Rose but his drug-addicted lover, Trevor; his Latino co-workers who cut tobacco; women working in nail salons; and poor white families crammed onto Hartford porches. Into the tapestry of his life, he weaves accounts of struggling animals: migrating butterflies, buffalos running off cliffs, hummingbirds striving to remain airborne, monkeys whose brains are eaten while they are still alive. There is nothing supernatural about Little Dog’s senses, but as a keen observer describing experiences unknown to many readers, he enables a “larger vision” by detailing small acts. He recalls that when workers cut tobacco with machetes, “you could hear the water inside the stems as the steel broke open the membranes, the ground darkening as the plants bled out” (p. 89). Literary scholar Mirja Lobnik has proposed that multisensory descriptions of marginalized people’s close attunement with their environments, especially those featuring sound, destabilize Western sensory hierarchies that prioritize vision and serve colonialism.[12] A craft that evokes sensations to open a new perceptual angle holds vast political potential.
To extend his metaphor for how writing feels, Little Dog describes writing that is literally handwork:
“I remember crawling to the table, how it was now a pile of soot, then dipping my fingers into it. … I remember cupping the ash and writing the words live live live on the foreheads of the three women sitting in the room. How the ash eventually hardened into ink on a blank page” (p. 233).
In this fantasized memory, Little Dog imagines himself writing Lan, Rose, and Mai into pulsing, breathing existence in the minds of his readers. In this novel about work, Vuong’s cues to imagine crawling, blackening one’s fingers, and drawing let Little Dog’s world emerge. Rather than “breaking free” from the political, Vuong’s and Little Dog’s craft tells a story that transforms perception by describing “small” experiences.
Laura Otis is a Professor of English Emerita at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. At the ZfL she is pursuing the research project “Cognitive Craft: How Four Writers Speak to Readers’ Senses.”
[1] Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, New York, 2019, pp. 186-87. All quotations are referenced in the text.
[2] Interdisciplinary scholar Ziqi Jin is working to integrate “rhetorical narratology, fiction writers’ craft knowledge, and the psychology of aesthetics.” Ziqi Jin: Crafting a Shared Universe: An Interdisciplinary Poetics of Narrative. Ph.D. dissertation. Seattle, 2024, p. 19.
[3] Richard Sennett: The Craftsman. New Haven, 2008, p. 10; Juhani Pallasmaa: The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Hoboken, 2012, p. 13.
[4] Elaine Scarry: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, 1985, p. 12.
[5] Jim Collins: “If You Can Read, You Can Write, or Can You, Really?” in: Anneleen Masschelein and Dirk de Geest (eds.), Writing Manuals for the Masses: The Rise of the Literary Advice Industry From Quill to Keyboard. London, 2021, p. 383. Collins argues that Briefly Gorgeous works against any attempt to separate craft from the urge to tell one’s story. See pp. 383, 386.
[6] Lee Konstantinou and Dan Sinykin: “Literature and Publishing, 1945-2020,” in: American Literary History, vol. 33, no. 2, 2021, pp. 225-43, here p. 238.
[7] Laura B. McGrath, “Literary Agency,” in: American Literary History, vol. 33, no. 2, 2021, pp. 350-70, here p. 357.
[8] Ibid., p. 361. McGrath analyzes the transformative work of literary agent Nicole Aragi, who has built a “list” of writers of color and encouraged them to support each other.
[9] Ibid., p. 364.
[10] In the metric system, Little Dog is 163 cm tall and weighs 51 kilos.
[11] Anežka Kuzmičová: “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment,” in: Semiotica, vol. 189, 2012, pp. 23-48, here p. 40.
[12] Mirja Lobnik: “Sounding Ecologies in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” in: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 62, no. 1, 2016, pp. 115-35, here pp. 117-18.
