On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

by

Ocean Vuong

Ma/Rose Character Analysis

Little Dog’s mother, Lan’s daughter, and Mai’s sister. On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter written by Little Dog to Rose, in which he pieces their lives together with his memories. Rose is born near Saigon during the Vietnam War. Her mother is a prostitute, and her father is an “American john.” Rose grows up a half-white “ghost-girl” in Vietnam, where children throw feces at her to make her darker and try to scrape the white from her skin with a spoon, as if to be born half-white is a “wrong” to “be reversed.” Rose watches her schoolhouse collapse in a napalm raid when she is five years old, and she never returns to school or learns to read. She marries an abusive man, with whom she has Little Dog. They, along with Lan and Mai, all immigrate to the United States after fleeing to the Philippines as refugees in 1990. Rose’s husband is sent to prison for beating her not long after they arrive in Hartford, Connecticut. She must work long hours as a manicurist to support Little Dog, all while trying to cope with the posttraumatic stress of the war. According to Lan, Rose is also schizophrenic, and she frequently responds to ordinary occurrences—like fireworks on the Fourth of July or gunshots in Hartford—in an extreme way. She also loses her temper with Little Dog and beats him, at times for no reason at all. When Little Dog finally tells his mother he is gay, she asks him if he plans to wear a dress and vomits twice. Rose and Little Dog certainly have a strained relationship; however, Little Dog badly wants to connect with her in a meaningful way through his letter. The character of Rose represents the unique generation born of the Vietnam War. Even Little Dog is sure what to call her. “White, Asian, orphan, American, mother?” Rose also reflects the effects of war and posttraumatic stress disorder and its connection to violence and abuse.

Ma/Rose Quotes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous quotes below are all either spoken by Ma/Rose or refer to Ma/Rose. 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:
War, Trauma, and Abuse  Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, "Boom!" You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’m sorry,” you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. “Grab your coat. I’ll get you McDonald’s.” Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. “You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?”

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. “Do I look like a real American?” you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan
Related Symbols: Monarch Butterflies
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

“You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going You have a bellyful of English. […] You have to use it, okay?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

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 it to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 31-32
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan, Paul
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2 Quotes

“If it’s the same price anyway,” she says. “I can still feel it down there. It’s silly, but I can. I can.”

Related Characters: Rose’s Client (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, bur 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 pals, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 91-92
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t like girls.”

I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it—pê-đê—from the French pédé, short for pédéraste. Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“Tell me,” you sat up, a concerned look on your face, “when did all this start? I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy. I know that. When?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

A few months before our talk at Dunkin' Donuts, a fourteen-year-old boy in rural Vietnam had acid thrown in his face after he slipped a love letter into another boy's locker. Last summer, twenty-eight-year-old Florida native Omar Mateen walked into an Orlando nightclub, raised his automatic rifle, and opened fire. 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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous LitChart as a printable PDF.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous PDF

Ma/Rose Quotes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous quotes below are all either spoken by Ma/Rose or refer to Ma/Rose. 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:
War, Trauma, and Abuse  Theme Icon
).
Part 1 Quotes

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, "Boom!" You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’m sorry,” you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. “Grab your coat. I’ll get you McDonald’s.” Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. “You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?”

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. “Do I look like a real American?” you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan
Related Symbols: Monarch Butterflies
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

“You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going You have a bellyful of English. […] You have to use it, okay?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

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 it to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 31-32
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose, Lan, Paul
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2 Quotes

“If it’s the same price anyway,” she says. “I can still feel it down there. It’s silly, but I can. I can.”

Related Characters: Rose’s Client (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, bur 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 pals, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 91-92
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t like girls.”

I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it—pê-đê—from the French pédé, short for pédéraste. Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“Tell me,” you sat up, a concerned look on your face, “when did all this start? I gave birth to a healthy, normal boy. I know that. When?”

Related Characters: Ma/Rose (speaker), Little Dog
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

A few months before our talk at Dunkin' Donuts, a fourteen-year-old boy in rural Vietnam had acid thrown in his face after he slipped a love letter into another boy's locker. Last summer, twenty-eight-year-old Florida native Omar Mateen walked into an Orlando nightclub, raised his automatic rifle, and opened fire. 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.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.

Related Characters: Little Dog (speaker), Ma/Rose
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis: