Remembering the past, a loved one, a place--these are individual and collective acts occurring within intricate webs of history and affect. Ocean Vuong tells us that to miss (long for) and to remember are interwoven concepts. Yet, despite sharing the same word in the Vietnamese language, missing and remembering are actually nuanced and disparate processes. How much of the painful past did Vuong have to forget so that they might miss their mother? To long for or miss a person, time, or place (as Vietnamese Americans have longed for and missed South Vietnam) is to shore up nostalgia and create near-fictive imaginings of the good times. Remembering, however, requires confrontations with the good, the bad, and the irresolutions; a process to reclaim the past for present and future ends.

The duality of nhớ as signifying either to miss or to remember must be conceptualized on both individual and social scales. Verne Harris suggests that discerning the difference between remembrancing (instrument of power) and remembering (complex, incomplete) might enable ways to understand the politics of memory keeping. “Remembrancing” is akin to Vuong’s notion of missing his mother, a desire that often succumbs to romanticism and nostalgia, yet “remembering” is to recall her in her complexity as a flawed and whole human being.

For those displaced by war and who have experienced various forms of violence (domestic, racial, sexual), Ocean Vuong's evocative exploration of memory and forgetting can simultaneously be a balm and a relentless trigger. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter to the women who nurtured Ocean, but it also addresses all of us, inviting us to delve into a more nuanced engagement with refugee subjectivity.