On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

10 pages into a book and I'm already crying??

I've had this sitting on my shelf for the past few months. My friend highly praised it and became a fan of his work, so I thought it might be as life-changing for me.

However, I did not expect my eyes to water just from the first page.

I don't know WHAT exactly it is. It's a combination of knowing that it's an extremely vulnerable, heartbreaking book about his complicated relationship with his mom, the Vietnamese immigrant parent x American child aspect (I can 100% relate to), and the fact that his mom will/has passed away. It's the first time a book has made me viscerally cry like this, snot and all, and I had to put it down.

It kept making me think about my own parents and their difficult lives, my future without them, and knowing that I don't have such strong childhood memories with them, or even such strong ones now. Also, I feel like I'm kinda mourning the fact that my parents don't really have hobbies of their own now. It's mostly just housework, Youtube and TV, and it makes me sad that they didn't have as much of a chance to do and be whatever they wanted to be, and there's not much interest now.

I am so upset and MAD this book got me like this just from 10 pages. In the end, I was unable to finish it, too afraid of experiencing the pain and emotions again. It's a tough poetic read, and I didn't end up finishing it. Maybe one day, but I'm not that into poetic writing.

Literally and figuratively close to home.

It's true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane's turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now—as Lan called to me, "Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother." And we knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.

Beautiful prose, no doubt. But for a personal story, I felt like the writing was way too flashy. Maybe it's my personal preference, but I like books that can be raw and vulnerable without having to use so much grandeur in its prose. And it just felt really disjointed and felt like a compilation of short stories instead of a novel. I really tried to like this and give it more stars, but I just didn't have the heart to. I liked some passages, but the book as a whole honestly didn't really move me.