Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous explores the settings of trauma and survival through a structure inspired by Kishōtenketsu, an Eastern narrative form that avoids conflict as a driving force. Instead of moving toward resolution through tension, Vuong’s prose unfolds as a series of layered meditations—introducing shifting themes and allowing connections to emerge over time. As Smith and Watson suggest, this kind of narrative deferral opens space for “concatenations of experience” that resist neat closure (Smith and Watson, 72). One such recurring thread is the word “sorry,” which morphs throughout the memoir into a symbol of both submission and resilience.
In one early passage, Vuong writes, “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… Because the mouth must eat” (Vongue, 53). Here, the apology is no longer tied to guilt—it becomes a transactional act, a strategy for survival. This iteration of “sorry” defines the body in economic and gendered systems of labor. Vuong’s mother and her co-workers do not apologize because they are wrong; they do so because their livelihoods depend on it. The act of saying sorry becomes embedded in the mouth, in the body, in the daily repetition of survival.
This bodily imprint of apology appears again in a very different context: the tobacco fields of Connecticut. Vuong recalls the immigrant men he labored alongside and writes, “Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain” (Vongue, 53). In this version, “sorry” acts as a marker of compliance, a way of smoothing over one’s presence in a hostile country. Vuong recounts the numerous personal reasons the men were saving their salaries through this approach, “George was one grand away, from buying his mother a house outside Guadalajara. Brandon was going to send his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lucinda, to university in Mexico City to be a dentist, like she always wanted” (Vongue, 53). Vuong never directly links these threads, but their recurrence invites us to read across settings, to notice how the same word wears different masks depending on the body speaking it.
The framework of the implicated subject, as Smith and Watson define it, offers one way to understand these recurring apologies. They describe it as “a figure for describing how people ‘inherited and benefited from historical injustices’… shifting issues of accountability from a discourse of guilt to one of responsibility” (Smith and Watson, 46). The women in the salon and the men in the fields are implicated in systems of labor and survival, though they may not hold power in the traditional sense. Likewise, Vuong draws a parallel to more direct beneficiaries of structural injustice, such as those profiting from the pharmaceutical industry: “They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions… I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness” (Vongue, 94). In both cases, suffering becomes legible only when it serves a system—whether through labor or as a pathology to be treated and monetized.
Smith and Watson also write that “experience is discursive”—shaped by the stories we tell and the bodily conditions under which we live (Smith and Watson, 60). Vuong’s memoir resists a singular arc of trauma or healing, instead assembling its meaning through accumulation, repetition, and return. The word “sorry” becomes a kind of refrain, mapping both the trauma of assimilation and the compromises required for survival. It is not cathartic or redemptive; it is functional, even mechanical. But in its repetition, it reveals how power operates beyond the level of policy or violence, but also in the tiniest gestures of endurance.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous ultimately resists the temptation to frame trauma as something to overcome. Instead, it leans into what Smith and Watson call “assemblage theory,” which understands identity as a dynamic constellation of experiences, affiliations, and embodied responses (Smith and Watson, 72). Vuong’s characters do not arrive at a fixed point of healing or reconciliation. Rather, they accumulate—words, gestures, pains, and apologies—each layered on top of the last, forming something like meaning, if not conclusion. The effect is both intimate and expansive, a memoir that teaches us how to listen for the ways survival speaks, even when it whispers.
I really appreciate the close attention to such a small–yet significant–feature of this narrative–the ways in which, as you write, the word “sorry” becomes a kind of refrain, mapping both the trauma of assimilation and the compromises required for survival. It is not cathartic or redemptive; it is functional, even mechanical.” You connect these ideas really clearly and extensively to Reading Autobiography Now and the pressures of assimilation as they press upon the subject. Well done!