Published by Jonathan Cape / Vintage / Penguin, 2019, 242 pages.

“In a previous draft of this letter, one I’ve since deleted, I told you how I came to be a writer. How I, the first in our family to go to college, squandered it on a degree in English. … But none of that matters now. What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know.”

This novel is a letter from a young man, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother, Hong (also known as Rose, a translation of her name). He pours everything into it, knowing that she will never be able to read it.

Little Dog was born in Vietnam. His family left the country after the war and settled in the US. He was born with another name, but his grandmother Lan calls him Little Dog because the weakest were given derogatory names so that evil spirits would not bother them. “To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield.”

In this book, Little Dog tells his story, and those of his mother and grandmother: Little Dog bearing the brunt of Rose’s frequent rages, a result of her PTSD; Lan’s escape from an arranged marriage in Vietnam and her subsequent life as a prostitute; and Little Dog’s first love, an American boy called Trevor, also the victim of domestic abuse.

Rose works in a nail salon, using products that damage her health. Little Dog loves his mother, in spite of the abuse, and the two are very close. He writes about her hands, how they were ruined because of years of working in factories and nail salons: “I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream”. His description of the nail salon is so vivid: it is not just a place where women come to be made beautiful, but also a place where children are raised, and where, in the back rooms, women are cooking large pots of pho, filling the salon with “aromas of clove, cinnamon, ginger, mint, and cardamom, mixing with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol and bleach. A place where folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country are told, expanded, laughter erupting in back room the size of rich people’s closets, then quickly lulled into an eerie, untouched quiet.”

There is tenderness here too: in the love affair between Little Dog and Trevor, both boys emotionally scarred from abuse and finding solace in each other. But eventually, Little Dog goes to college, leaving Trevor behind to deal with his demons.

There is also a wonderful scene where an old woman walks into Rose’s salon, wanting a pedicure. She only has one leg—the other is a prosthesis, which she removes. When Rose finishes, the woman indicates her phantom limb and asks if Rose could do that too. Without missing a beat, Rose attends to the missing leg, treating it with as much care as she did the real one.

Although most of the book is set in the US, Vietnam is never far away. It appears in flashbacks, the few memories Little Dog has of life before the war, and the trauma that the family carries from the war.

“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.” Ocean Vuong is also a poet, and it shows. This is a beautifully written book about how we are intricately linked to our past, and our lives are entangled with the lives of those who have gone before us; how we bear the scars not only of what we have been through but also what happens to the ones we love. And about how we are also our memories, and the way we tell stories to remember and to heal.