Nothing to Hide Under All This Sun

As the master of a second language, one of Ocean Vuong’s great labors is to question the meanings behind idioms and figures of speech that native speakers often take for granted. Vuong breaks these down and makes them make sense. In a 2021 interview with Fantastic Man, he credits his work with the English language to the influence of Vietnamese, which he calls “monosyllabic … tonal.” As he explains,

every sound has its own life … if you’re a Vietnamese child listening in a Vietnamese household, your life depends on every syllable.… By the time I listened to English, I realised that Vietnamese became almost like a superpower … I could hear the music under everything.

The Vietnamese word for love and weakness is the same: yé'u. The more you love someone, the more vulnerable you make yourself to the pain of loss.

The pain of loss and the threat of male violence are at the center of Vuong’s work, which includes the poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016) and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). His new collection, Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), further explores this and other recurrent themes: Vuong’s status as a writer, an Asian American, a son of parents who lived through the war in Vietnam and experienced PTSD, a “faggot,” a non-white refugee, and a witness to and victim of domestic violence. "The Bull," which opens the new collection, sets readers on high alert with an ambiguous situation that could go either way. The speaker encounters a mysterious figure in his backyard. Enjambment creates a sense of movement in the quiet night: "Wind / in the branches." Darkness forms like a bruise. Another enjambment, "kerosene / -blue eyes," calms the initial threat and at the same time—to this Black reader's eyes—reinforces it.

Though Time Is a Mother is a receptacle of grief, it is also a search for truth and a space for Vuong to meditate on why to write, why to carry on living after “crushing it in losses,” appropriating the idioms of American white male brutality and war to turn the spilled blood of innocent civilians into poetic language. English, likened here to the shadow a lynched body casts, is the language of Vuong’s imagination and self-expression but not of his relationship with his mother, to whom Briefly Gorgeous is ostensibly addressed in the form of a letter. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and Vuong bears many similarities to its protagonist, Little Dog, including a history of addiction and abuse. Echoes of the novel appear in “Dear Rose,” a breathless, unpunctuated scream of a poem through a tempest of bullets that, like Briefly Gorgeous, starts with the line let me begin again and continues “Pink Rose Hong Mom / are you reading this dear / reader are you my mom yet / I cannot find her without you.”

In “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker,” the speaker pays a simple, touching tribute to his mother, who died of cancer. (Vuong’s mother died of breast cancer in 2019.) The poem is a list of purchases his mother made each month over almost two years: thank-you cards for her loyal customers, lipstick the shade of Night Out Red, bleach, multiple packages of Advil, and chilling periods of no activity at all. It documents the closing of a business, a body, a life. The final item is a single pair of gray wool socks—the speaker’s father works in a sock factory. Given Vuong’s highly effective use of circularity throughout his work, I couldn’t help but think of the little white bootees on a newborn and of the realization in Briefly Gorgeous that the present tense of Rose, his mother's name, is rise. In light of the 2021 Atlanta shootings, in which a white man killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at three spas around the city, the poem also feels like a meditation on his mother’s fragility, working, as she does, in a business where she, too, could be targeted at random.

In We Should All Be Feminists (2014), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, "We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability." The 14-line “Old Glory” is constructed from seemingly innocuous, everyday statements that come across in turn like those of pushy bleacher dads, then drunk ex-jocks at a strip club. It’s language that shows, as Vuong observed in a 2019 Paris Review essay, how freely the “lexicon of conquest” spreads and deepens in menace. The poem opens:

Knock ’em dead, big guy. Go in there
guns blazing, buddy. You crushed
at the show. No, it was a blowout. No,
a massacre. Total overkill.

In “American Legend,” Vuong's speaker can bring his father closer to him only by crashing the car they’re in, apparently killing him. He is “driving / with my old man. The day wasted / save for the cobalt haze / closing around us. / We were on our way to kill / our dog, Susan.” Cobalt blue is the soft, chalky pigment used in Chinese porcelain, but cobalt itself is silver gray, so the weather changes right above readers’ heads as the speaker accidentally-on-purpose turns the wheel too hard into a hairpin at high speed:

[…]      As the colors spun
through the windshield, wild
metal clanking
our shoulders, the sudden
wetness warm
everywhere, he slammed
into me &
we hugged
for the first time
in decades […]
I did it to hold
my father, to free
my dog.

As suggested in "Ars Poetica as The Maker," Vuong writes to own something he has not been able to control, to tame something into tenderness, to lament unnecessary loss: "Because the butterfly's yellow wing / flickering in black mud / was a word / stranded by its language." Color symbolism emphasizes the author's perpetual concern with his status as other and his ambivalence about writing as a career: "Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold." In Vietnamese culture, golden yellow is the color of freedom. White—symbolizing purity, transparency, and death—is ubiquitous in these pages, from the snow angel the speaker creates in “Snow Theory,” as if to bring his mother back to life, to the snow his partner shovels while the speaker bakes bread, meditating on a recipe handed down by his partner's grandmother, encouraging him to "beat eggs until happy yellow," as in “Nothing.” Black—representing evil—betokens environmental concerns. The thumping consonance of "inkwell black oil wrung through your father's fingers after a day beneath the Buick" suggests bloody-handedness on the part of oil companies. In "The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica," the speaker declares, "I want to / take care of our planet / because I need a beautiful / graveyard."

Vuong contemplates the traumas visited on Black and brown (and, in his terms, yellow) bodies in the name of whiteness and where the hegemonic culture is flipped. As a child in Vietnam, his mother, a light-skinned girl who could “pass” as white (until she spoke), was smeared in cow shit by bullies to make her the “right” color. In much of his work, Vuong creates an alliance of non-whiteness in which African American, AAPI, and indigenous histories mesh. In a touching scene in Briefly Gorgeous, for example, the Black church welcomes his mother, and in another scene, soul food becomes part of the family’s diet. In Time Is a Mother, “The Punctum” is presented as a paragraph of prose like a headstone, recognizing the lives of “over 350 poorly documented lynchings in California [between 1830 and 1935], the victims being mostly of Mexican, Chinese and Native American descent.” The speaker implicates himself in these legacies of violence:

There is nothing to hide under all this sun. And your hand moves to your throat, to make sure you are still the speaker, that English is still your reckoned wreck. That it hasn’t pooled into an ink-dark puddle at your feet. You feel for your throat because history has proven the skull lodged in the gravedigger’s hands is often the one behind your face.

In “Toy Boat,” dedicated to Tamir Rice, a yellow plastic boat floats on a black sea, which I read as a symbol of the Atlantic Ocean as gravesite for the innumerable Black bodies that escaped—or were discarded from—the enslavement process during the Middle Passage. As has been well documented, under “the single eye pressed down on us,” as Vuong writes in “The Punctum,” Black suffering was marketed as entertainment in the form of lynched bodies. Black and brown (and yellow) people have shouldered the burden of global war and genocide while their traumatized bodies were erased. As Little Dog says in Briefly Gorgeous, “The truth is, I’m worried they will get us before they get us.”

For all the grief, writers must gain a certain freedom and power after losing their parents, and, certainly, they gain the space to reflect. In "Rise & Shine," the speaker calls himself a “decent son” for making fish sauce the way his mother taught him, fish sauce being essentially the putrefaction of whole dead fish, death becoming sustenance, the way the deaths of the speaker’s parents, friends, and lovers sustain this exploration of grief. The poem also addresses addiction: "Scraped the last $8.48 / from the glass jar. / Your day's worth of tips / at the nail salon. / Enough for one hit. Enough / to be good / till noon but / these hands already / blurring."

One might call Vuong’s work autofiction, but to my mind, it approaches autotheory in combining matrilineal stories with his own confessional mode, while musing, with frequent references to Barthes, on nature, queerness, violence, war, and language. Autotheory is a subject the writer Lauren Fournier recently expanded on to describe the practices of feminist artists and writers—Maggie Nelson and Audre Lorde, among others—to center their lived experiences in the critical frameworks of their art. Male critics once considered the I in criticism trite, forgetting that Saint Augustine, Nietzsche, and Freud were all proponents of autotheory long before the term was purportedly coined in 1997. It is important, then, for diasporic writers to take on the burden of storytelling for their ascendants, who may not be able or willing to speak for themselves, lest they inadvertently comply with that process of erasure.

One hopes that each successive generation’s cultural awakening is softer than “shrapnel embedded in my brain which is called learning,” as Vuong writes in “Dear Sara,” a response to an exceptionally precocious seven-year-old niece’s question about the futility of writing. In “No One Knows the Way to Heaven,” which appears on the page as two spliced-together columns of text with uneven gaps in between, like spooning lovers warming an unborn, Vuong communicates with a son-to-be who may never be; as he observes, life is but a doorway people pass through, the past one room and the afterlife another. Though his mother was conceived from a single liaison with a faceless American john, “when a man & a man make / love, they make / only love. There’s enough / for you, but not enough / for you.”  

The concept of a “chosen family” is tricky because it is such a convenient landing spot for heteronormativity and because families have so often and for so long poured toxicity into queer lives. In the Fantastic Man interview, Vuong speaks about the rich queer community he is part of in Northampton, Mass., where everyone uses their skills, knowledge, and expertise to help one another and where meal trains are laid out for people in need. In these poems, family and community sometimes find metaphoric realization in nature. Trees, a recurring motif, “look like grandfathers laughing in the rain.” With their deep root systems, trees survive even in death, where they’re ecosystem hosts, entangled in one another.

In responding to public health crises such as cancer and the opiate crisis, Vuong recalls poets of the AIDS epidemic, such as Essex Hemphill and Thom Gunn. There is a clear sense of reevaluation and a depressive tone, perhaps, redolent of lockdown meditation. In several poems, disparate thoughts come together like collages of found objects, creating a sense of alienation and evoking the way the mind works when external triggers elicit random thoughts and memories. It’s as if, having seen first-hand the structure of human existence from birth to death through sickness and addiction, the speaker preserves fragmentary images and observations like flying shrapnel amid the car crashes, the inherited memories of war, and the scars of his childhood. It also feels at times as if he is stepping into the mind of the aggressor, with scatter-gun statements such as “Stand back, I’m a loser on a winning streak.” Vuong has spoken about how “the pressure of making sometimes ruins the endeavour of understanding” and that “if there’s no other books from here on in, then that’s okay.” Having poured his grief into his strongest work to date, the last line of Time Is a Mother, “& I was free,” does make for a suitable ending.