On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese and the Việt Cộng launched the Tet Offensive, one of the largest attacks of the war. By 1964, American troops in South Vietnam went from 16,000 to 184,000, and both the Americans and the South Vietnamese were engaged and attacked by the Việt Cộng and the People’s Army of Vietnam. Along with the Việt Cộng, the North Vietnamese army, known as the People’s Army of Vietnam, invaded and attacked South Vietnam and Laos, leading to an increase in American troops in Vietnam. The war began when the Việt Cộng-a group of South Vietnamese guerrillas under the command of North Vietnam-attacked South Vietnam. Vietnam was divided into the communist state of North Vietnam (which was backed by the Soviet Union and China), and the anti-communist state of South Vietnam (which was backed the United States, South Korea, and other anti-communist countries).

The Vietnam War, which began in November of 1955 and lasted until the Fall of Saigon in April of 1975, involved the countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. He specifically mentions the Tet Offensive, a North Vietnamese attack on South Vietnam in 1968. In On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong explores the lasting effects of the Vietnam War on his family. Vuong currently lives in Massachusetts, where he is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program for poets and writers at UMass-Amherst. Vuong’s first novel, On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 30 languages in 2019 to critical and popular acclaim, after which he was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, an award that invests in the future work of gifted intellectuals. That same year he was awarded the Whiting Award, an annual prize awarded to promising poets and writers. In 2016, Vuong published his first full-length book of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Later, in 2014, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, which seeks to promote poetry and culture. He published his first chapbook (meaning a small booklet), Burnings, in 2011. Vuong went on to earn a degree in 19th-century English Literature from Brooklyn College and an MFA in poetry from New York University. In 1990, Vuong’s family fled Vietnam to a refugee camp in the Philippines and later settled in Hartford, Connecticut. After the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, however, Vuong’s grandfather went back home to the United States to visit his family and was unable to return again to Vietnam. Vuong’s grandparents were married and had three children. Like Little Dog in On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s maternal grandfather was a white American naval officer stationed in Vietnam during the war.

Ocean Vuong was born in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in 1988, but grew up on a rural farm.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong