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Little Dog’s grandmother, Rose and Mai’s mother, and Paul’s ex-wife. Lan is born in the Go Cong District of Vietnam, and after leaving an arranged marriage in the late 1960s, she moves to Saigon. Lan is forced to work as a prostitute to survive during the Vietnam War, and she soon gives birth to Rose, the daughter of an “American john.” Lan meets and falls in love with Paul, an American soldier, in a Saigon bar in 1967. She marries Paul and has two more children, but when Paul goes to the United States for a visit, he is unable to return to Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon and the end of the war in 1975. Lan flees Vietnam with Rose, Mai, and Little Dog in 1990, and she later lives with Rose and Little Dog in Hartford, Connecticut. Lan is schizophrenic, a condition that is worsened by the trauma of war, and she is a big part of Little Dog’s life growing up. When Rose beats Little Dog, Lan uses her body as a shield to protect him, and she tenderly treats his cuts, bruises, and welts with old Vietnamese remedies. Lan tries to get Little Dog to see that his mother cares for him, even if Rose’s own mental illness makes it difficult for her to express herself. Lan tells Little Dog countless stories of their family and history in Vietnam, through which Little Dog learns about his Vietnamese identity. Lan dies of metastatic bone cancer at the end of the novel, and Rose and Little Dog take her ashes back to Vietnam for burial. Lan and her stories represent the power of memory and storytelling in the novel, but her character also represents the lasting effects of war on survivors. Like Rose, Lan likely has posttraumatic stress disorder, and the violence, fear, and pain of war remain with her throughout her life.
Lan Quotes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
The On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous quotes below are all either spoken by Lan or refer to Lan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Quotes
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the 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.
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Paul finishes his portion of the story. And I want to tell him. I want to say that his daughter who is not his daughter was a half-white child in Go Cong, which meant the children called her ghost-girl, called Lan a traitor and a whore for sleeping with the enemy. How they cut her auburn-tinted hair while she walked home from the market, arms full with baskets of bananas and green squash, so that when she got home, there'd be only a few locks left above her forehead. How when she ran out of hair, they slapped buffalo shit on her face and shoulders to make her brown again, as if to be born lighter was a wrong that could be reversed.
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Part 3
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One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. "Why they die themselves like that?" she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: "They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That's all. They don’t know it's a cliff,"
"Maybe they should have a stop sign then."
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Get the entire On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous LitChart as a printable PDF.
Lan Quotes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
The On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous quotes below are all either spoken by Lan or refer to Lan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 1
Quotes
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the 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.
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Paul finishes his portion of the story. And I want to tell him. I want to say that his daughter who is not his daughter was a half-white child in Go Cong, which meant the children called her ghost-girl, called Lan a traitor and a whore for sleeping with the enemy. How they cut her auburn-tinted hair while she walked home from the market, arms full with baskets of bananas and green squash, so that when she got home, there'd be only a few locks left above her forehead. How when she ran out of hair, they slapped buffalo shit on her face and shoulders to make her brown again, as if to be born lighter was a wrong that could be reversed.
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Part 3
Quotes
One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. "Why they die themselves like that?" she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: "They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That's all. They don’t know it's a cliff,"
"Maybe they should have a stop sign then."
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