Ocean Vuong Analysis: Little Dog
Written By: Amayah Meas
Little Dog. One whose name is so despicable that it becomes a shield. A shield for a person who is barely seen as it is, who is taught that to be invisible is to be safe, for his yellow skin is already a strike against him. Little Dog is someone who has not been heard, who reaches the world not as himself, but as an echo of a sound that he once was. As a child of a Vietnamese immigrant in a western world, he quickly learned that sometimes one is erased before they are given the choice of stating who they are, a nameless yellow body not considered human because it did not reserve a slot on a piece of paper (Vuong, 63). Little Dog is angry. Angry at the mother who brought him into a world that does not accept or choose to see him.
Ocean Vuong is Little Dog in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Told that “freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey,” the book is written in the format of letters addressed to his illiterate mother (4). To write to a mother who will never understand is to speak his truth while connecting from a distance. A distance he works to close on a journey of realizing that trauma is generational. We follow Little Dog on this journey in the novel, full of stories and thoughts that display a damaged body gaining its strength with such sensitivity and vulnerability that allows the readers to be heard and heal alongside him.
The book is a story of love in its alternate forms. It is a story of a product of war that learns to heal despite the circumstances that bred confusion and hate. It is a story of Little Dog, who turns this confusion and hate into forgiveness, remembrance, acceptance, and beyond, which allows him to be seen in a world that initially denied him, to start with a truth and turn it to art in American letters.
“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,’” (33). Why is it that victims of war face a wall that separates them from emotional vulnerability? A detail that seems initially minute seeps into relationships and identity through mistrust and self-doubt, growing into a block that prohibits progression into the elusive vulnerability. When violence is all we know of love, to arrive at love is to arrive by obliteration. When offered tenderness, it feels like proof that we’ve been ruined (119). Perhaps that is what keeps the wall standing tall. What should have been hugs and laughter and I love yous before bed each night, is replaced with violence and night-long episodes of crouching below windows as fireworks for independence explode just above. Perhaps our way of breaking down the wall is to fight violence with violence, even if we’re taught that violence is never the answer.
Maybe a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. “‘I’m not a monster. I’m a mother,’” she said. A Latin root adopted by the Old French, monster means an animal of myriad origins, to be a hybrid signal of both shelter and warning at once, like a lighthouse (13). Everything has a starting point. The origins of her monstrous tendencies begin with war. To be both shelter and warning is to be a mother. A mother who hits her child to prepare him for war. “‘You have to find a way, Little Dog. You have to step up or they’ll keep going.’” The mother who hits him is the same mother who heats up his meal for the third time, waiting for him to come home. Origins are rooted in love too, masked by trauma too strong to deny yet so heavily within us that we fail to realize it as a separate entity. Perhaps that is the mere fact of it, though. Trauma is our identity. “You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I – which is why I can’t turn away from you,” (14). Maybe our monstrous tendencies are what keeps us together.
“When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain...Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps...My doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real,” (62). Products of war are born on a foundation of fear and uncertainty. It takes courage to live with it, and even more to accept that it is a part of us. A bond born on a foundation of trust is the antidote. It is a mutual act of vulnerability when I love yous seem foreign. It is a shelter to take refuge in when we feel like everything around us will dissolve at any moment. It is love disguised as tenderness and solitude between two people who are damaged. To have a person to survive alongside with is not so bad in a lonely world. Because solitude does not mean alone as one, it means the state of being alone, a pair of two who are one together. Because two is stronger than one.
“Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have a name for queer bodies – because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source,” (130). Why is it that a world of ideality is also one of destruction? To cherish a bond that lies on the same side of the spectrum is to protect from harm inflicted by the other side. “‘I don’t like girls. I can leave, Ma. If you don’t want me I can go.’ ‘You don’t have to go anywhere,’ she said, ‘It’s just you and me, Little Dog. I don’t have anyone else.’” Love is protection, when a mother uses her tiny pink polish to paint the silver marks on her son’s pink bike, scraped off by bullies drenched in homophobic impressions. “In Saigon, the sound of music and children playing late in the night is a sign of death – or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.” Drag performers dance in explosive outfits with overdrawn faces that trespass false rules of gender in a society where to be queer is a sin. At its worst, grief is unreal, which calls for a surreal response (226). The world we flee to is the same one that kills us, so we are left with each other as earth’s only remaining refuge.
In La Prieta, Gloria E. Anzaldúa writes, “I am terrified of making my mother the villain in my life rather than showing how she has been a victim,” (221). A tinted child in a world that deems whiteness as the ideal is already one step behind, marked with an inescapable “abnormality” that transmutes into shame of himself and the mother who birthed him. These notions we are inscribed with make us fall victim to patriarchy, heteronormativity, and the belief that white is better than brown, yellow, and any color in between. Everyone is a victim of the world. Some are just born with less strikes than others. How do we unlearn a belief that is reinforced every day of our lives? Through acceptance, the hatred we hold for ourselves during adolescence gradually turns to love. A childhood spent suppressing our native ways, stories, and attempts to be invisible left us tinted children with nothing in a world that will never fully receive us. “Well, I’m not ashamed of you anymore, Momma. My heart once bent and cracked, once ashamed of your China ways. Ma, hear me now, tell me your story again and again,” says Nellie Wong, From a Heart of Rice Straw. Acceptance is understanding that mother and child is one undeniable unit, blood and all. Your stories are mine, and I want to hear them now.
Sometimes our hatred for this cruel world is mistook for the ones who brought us here. An immigrant comes to America and quickly learns that it is a place where “dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones – with or without citizenship – aching, toxic, and underpaid,” (Vuong, 81). How do we gain freedom in a place where no one is ever free? Freedom is not an endpoint, but a symbol of what we encounter along our journey. “‘I hate you,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you to be my mom anymore. You hear me? You’re a monster–’ And with that her head is lopped off its shoulders. ‘Ma,’ he says to no one, his eyes filling, ‘I didn’t mean it. Ma!’” (127). As the distance between the hunter and prey slowly contracts, we realize that a mother is not the one we hate. She is damaged like us, more broken than we will ever know. To replace this hatred with forgiveness is to understand that her aching bones are a result of what we will only see through her eyes, to forgive before the prey is caught. Forgiveness is our shield, a name like Little Dog, that protects us in a never-ending chase. Through it, we attain our freedom symbol as a state of being one with our origins.
His mother taught him to understand that success is measured by the effect of one’s work on others. Vuong is currently a professor of Arts & Sciences at New York University. To be a teacher, he says, is transformative. Teachers are faced with a certain responsibility to make an impact on their students’ lives through the knowledge they share and bonds they form. His literature is a pathway to do so.
To write is to release. To release mounds of generational trauma and express love through forgiveness, acceptance, and solitude. Releasing is realizing that his mother was never the hunter. She is the prey alongside him who is trying to survive in a world that does not see yellow skin as beautiful, or anything at all. A world that drowns its prey in racism, homophobia, and so much more. The literature that brings them together, keeps them afloat for just a little while longer. Together they are gorgeous before they disappear, their memory preserved in the words on paper and those who are heard because of it.
References
Vuong, O. (2021). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel. Penguin Books.
Anzaldúa, G. (1981). La Prieta.
Wong, N. From a Heart of Rice Straw.
