On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Cancer,” the lady said. “And in the backyard, too! She died right there in the backyard, dammit.” You put down her hand, took off your mask. Cancer. You leaned forward. “My mom, too, she die from the cancer.” The room went quiet. Your co-workers shifted in their seats. “But what happen in backyard, why she die there?” The woman wiped her eyes. “That’s where she lives. Julie’s my horse.” You nodded, put on your mask, and got back to painting her nails. After the woman left, you flung the mask across the room. “A fucking horse?” you said in Vietnamese. “Holy shit, I was ready to go to her daughter’s grave with flowers!” For the rest of the day, while you worked on one hand or another, you would look up and shout, “It was a fucking horse!” and we’d all laugh.

Monarchs that survived the migration passed this message down to their children. The memory of family members lost from the initial winter was woven into their genes. When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once. I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say possessing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes to the body.

dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.

ricochet above us. Slowly, she guided me into her lap and we waited. She went on, in whispered bursts, about the mortars, her hand periodically covering my lower face—the scent of garlic and Tiger Balm sharp in my nose. We must have sat for two hours like that, her heartbeat steady on my back as the room began to grey, then washed in indigo, revealing two sleeping forms swaddled in blankets and stretched across the floor before us: you and your sister, Mai. You resembled soft mountain ranges on a snowy tundra. My family, I thought, was this silent arctic landscape, placid at last after a night of artillery fire.

As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

“Yes. You’re both happy,” I answered, knowing nothing. “You’re both happy, Ma. Yes,” I said again. Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t

The olive tag stitched to the boy’s chest frames a word. Although the woman cannot read it, she knows it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat.

Tiger Phong died of heart failure, most likely brought on by poor nutrition and exhaustion at the camp. But for a brief eight months in 1975 and 1976, the two most important Tigers in Earl Woods’s life were alive at once, sharing the same planet, one at the fragile end of a brutal history, the other just beginning a legacy of his own. The name “Tiger,” but also Earl himself, had become a bridge.

Your real one. Cheeks wet with tears, you nearly shouted. “Where are you, Ba?” you demanded in Vietnamese, shifting from foot to foot. “Where the hell are you? Come get me! Get me out of here! Come back and get me.” It might have been the first time Vietnamese was ever spoken in that church. But no one glared at you with questions in their eyes. No one made a double take at the yellow-white woman speaking her own tongue. Throughout the pews other people were also shouting, in excitement, joy, anger, or exasperation. It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong.

Days later, I would hear “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” coming from the kitchen. You were at the table, practicing your manicurist techniques on rubber mannequin hands. Dionne had given you a tape of gospel songs, and you hummed along as you worked, as the disembodied hands, their fingers lustered with candy colors, sprouted along the kitchen counters, their palms open, like the ones back in that church. But unlike the darker hands in the Ramirezes’ congregation, the ones in your kitchen were pink and beige, the only shades they came in.

There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But 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. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where,

When asked how he identifies his roots, Tiger Woods called himself “Cablinasian,” a portmanteau he invented to contain his ethnic makeup of Chinese, Thai, Black, Dutch, and Native American. To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.

You push back your chair, grab your keys, and walk out the door. “I’m not scared of dying anymore.” (A pause, then laughter.) The cold, like river water, rises to their throats. Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.

It’s a makeshift classroom where we arrive, fresh off the boat, the plane, the depths, hoping the salon would be a temporary stop—until we get on our feet, or rather, until our jaws soften around English syllables—bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that cost a quarter of our wages.

A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, 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. I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.

Even after all these years, the contrast between our skin surprises me—the way a blank page does when my hand, gripping a pen, begins to move through its spatial field, trying to act upon its life without marring it. But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.

But the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me. A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again. A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations.

It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

How after one more season, Manny would be back by the seaside village in El Salvador, running his fingers over the scar on his mother’s collarbone where a tumor would’ve just been removed using the pay he received removing tobacco from the Connecticut soil. How he’d buy, with his remaining savings, a boat and try his luck fishing for marlins. Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain.

Up until then I didn’t think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.

“No, oh no,” as if it was blood, not semen, that was leaving him. Done with ourselves, we lay for a while, our faces cooling as they dried. Now, whenever I visit a museum, I’m hesitant to come too close to a painting for fear of what I might, or might not, find there. Like the pinkish smear of Trevor’s dollar-store peaches, I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room’s threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed. Afterward, lying next to me with his face turned away, he cried skillfully in the dark. The way boys do. The first time we fucked, we didn’t fuck at all.

In his backyard, an empty dirt field beside a freeway overpass, I watched Trevor aim his .32 Winchester at a row of paint cans lined on an old park bench. I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.

I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already inside us.

The piano notes seep through the boy’s chest as he makes his way to the backyard. Because something in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

“Unlike your brother,” you said, “you were not born until we knew you’d live.”

I sat there, watching the concrete fleck with bits of pink as he gashed the key against the bike’s bones. I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English.

Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity. That night, in the bare-bulb kitchen, I knelt beside you and watched as you painted, in long strokes that swooped, with expert precision, over the cobalt scars along the bike, the bottle of pink nail polish steady and sure in your hand.

When your eyes came back you said, “It was in Saigon where I heard Chopin for the first time. Did you know that?” Your Vietnamese abruptly lighter, hovering. “I must’ve been six or seven. The man across the street was a concert pianist trained in Paris. He would set the Steinway in his courtyard and play it in the evenings with his gate open. And his dog, this little black dog, maybe this high, would stand up and start to dance. Its little twig legs padded the dust in circles but the man would never look at the dog, but kept his eyes closed as he played. That was his power. He didn’t care for the miracle he made with his hands. I sat there in the road and watched what I thought was magic: music turning an animal into a person. I looked at that dog, its ribs showing, dancing to French music and thought anything could happen. Anything.”

Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.

Forty-nine people were killed. It was a gay club and the boys, because that’s who they were—sons, teenagers—looked like me: a colored thing born of one mother, rummaging the dark, each other, for happiness. Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been? Where have we been, Ma?

wouldn’t stop burrowing into me. Could it be that, all those years ago, I had followed Gramoz in the schoolyard simply because he was a boy, and therefore a mirror of myself? But if so—why not? Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here.

I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We

Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist. And yes, it was not pizza bagels, all those years ago, that I wanted from Gramoz, but replication. Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to.

You steer the Toyota home, me silent beside you. It seems the rain will return this evening and all night the town will be rinsed, the trees lining the freeways dripping in the metallic dark. Over dinner, I’ll pull in my chair and, taking off my hood, a sprig of hay caught there from the barn weeks before will stick out from my black hair. You will reach over, brush it off, and shake your head as you take in the son you decided to keep.

Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them. In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you.

And you look through it and see the thick steam in the all-night bathhouse in Flushing, where someone reached out to me once, traced the trapped flute of my collarbone. I never saw that man’s face, only the gold-rimmed glasses floating in the fog. And then the feeling, the velvet heat of it, everywhere inside me. Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us? When Houdini failed to free himself from his handcuffs at the London Hippodrome, his wife, Bess, gave him a long, deep kiss. In doing so, she passed him the key that would save him. If there’s a heaven I think it looks like this.

Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more. As a rule, be more. As a rule, I miss you.

We brought her home, laid her back on a mat on the tile floor where it was cool, placed pillows along her length to keep her legs in place. What made it worse, you remember, was that Lan had never once believed, even to the end, that she had a terminal illness. We explained her diagnosis to her, about the tumors, the cells, metastasis, nouns so abstract that we might as well have been describing witchcraft. We told her that she was dying, that it would be two weeks, then one week, any day now. “Be ready. Be ready. What do you want? What do you need? What would you like to say?” we urged. But she wouldn’t have it. She said we were just children, that we didn’t know everything yet, and that when we grow up, we’d know how the world really works. And because denial, fabrication—storytelling—was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong? Pain, however, is no story in itself. And these last few days, while you were out making funeral arrangements, picking out the coffin, Lan would howl and cry out in long, piercing bursts. “What have I done?” she’d say, looking at the ceiling. “God, what have I done to have you step on me like this?” We would give her the synthetic Vicodin and OxyContin prescribed by the doctor, then the morphine, then more morphine.

Lan, turned over, would be dust the way even the word dying is nothing like the word dead. Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, which once made me proud to be the queer yellow faggot that I was and am, now betrays me.

As I look at Paul’s face on the screen, this soft-spoken man, this stranger turned grandfather turned family, I realize how little I know of us, of my country, any country. Standing by the dirt road, not unlike the road Lan had once stood on nearly forty years earlier, an M-16 pointed at her nose as she held you, I wait until my grandpa’s voice, this retired tutor, vegan, and marijuana grower, this lover of maps and Camus, finishes his last words to his first love, then close the laptop.

In my Hartford, where fathers were phantoms, dipping in and out of their children’s lives, like my own father. Where grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and bà ngoạis were kings, crowned with nothing but salvaged and improvised pride and the stubborn testament of their tongues as they waited on creaking knees and bloated feet outside Social Services for heat and oil assistance smelling of drugstore perfume and peppermint hard candies, their brown oversized Goodwill coats dusted with fresh snow as they huddled, steaming down the winter block—their sons and daughters at work or in jail or overdosed or just gone, hitching cross-country on Greyhounds with dreams of kicking the habit, starting anew, but then ghosting into family legends.

home to sleepy towns flushed with Pier 1 Imports and Whole Foods. Hartford, where we stayed when other Vietnamese immigrants fled to California or Houston. Where we made a kind of life digging in and out of one brutal winter after another, where nor’easters swallowed our cars overnight. The two a.m. gunshots, the two p.m. gunshots, the wives and girlfriends at the C-Town checkout with black eyes and cut lips, who return your gaze with lifted chins, as if to say, Mind your business.