”Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearance. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen- But to be seen allows you to be hunted.”

“We try to preserve life, even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless- but because like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

“If we are lucky, the end of a sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south. To turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”

“Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth in speech, is to leave only the bones which remain untold”

“It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus- That curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, staying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die , is to be gorgeous only briefly…”

“You’re not a monster.” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a bad 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 origin. Centaurs, griffon, satyr.To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both a shelter and warning at once

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhó. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhó mę không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?I miss you more than I remember you. “

Did you know that they get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country”

“All this time I told myself we were born from war- but I was wrong Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence- But having that violence passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”…“Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all- but an orphan. Our Vietnamese time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in in our mother language is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war”

Refugee

Little Dog, is a poet in his late 20s reflecting on his life as a gay man and immigrant. This book, written as a letter to his mother.

OCEAN VUONG