The novel insists that there is power, and with it, agency, in survival—which includes the interracial tensions you speak of—because trauma is still … - Ocean Vuong

This book is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a coming-of-art. I would say that I begin with the voices of those I care for, family or otherwise, and follow them until they drop off, until I have to create them in order to hear them. My writing is an echo. In this way, On Earth is not so much a novel, but the ghost of a novel. That’s the hope anyway.

When I really assess Western culture in how it grapples with other bodies and other ecologies of thinking, at the end of the day, my response is: please catch up. And I do mean – please – because we want you to catch up, we want you to be here, because where you’re at is a quicksand that’s killing you.

The incredible thing that I can never quite understand was how they were able to kick them all out. The men had access to jobs, money, a patriarchal presence in the world, and even though they had troubles too, as immigrants and refugees, we come from a patriarchal tradition in the old country just as deeply rooted as in the west. In some cases, when men are talking to each other, women aren’t supposed to even be in the room. So that was what they were coming out of. And to think divorce?! These things were still taboo where they came from. And they all really did it.