The Monsters We Love

"You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I — which is why I can’t turn away from you."

These are the words Ocean Vuong addresses his mother with in his part-memoir/novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.

Vuong says this because over the course of his childhood, violence and care are the languages that his mother is most comfortable in speaking to him with. In the "...More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence" chapter from How to Read Literature like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster writes about how violence often implicates something so much greater than just the damage it causes; in Vuong's case, violence originates from a place of generational trauma, PTSD, and righteous intentions to guard him from socially unacceptable behaviors his mother doesn't want him to engage in if he wishes to assimilate into the United States.

Noticeably, love is not one of the languages listed above that his mother employs. That is because, as according to feminist scholar bell hooks, "Love and abuse cannot coexist." Therefore, while it is unmistakable that Vuong's mother cares for him deeply, she cannot love him by hooks' definition because of the physical and emotional abuse she regularly inflicts on him.

Video: https://www.tiktok.com/@talkswitherykah/video/7107328891701775621

However, Vuong also writes that "To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once." Thus, because our parents are humans, they can be monsters, but also protectors at the same time. And, so many of us will go on with our lives loving them in spite of this, even if it comes at the expense of compromising personal values. Vuong knows he should resent his mother for the abuse he suffered at her hands — and he does — but in writing this novel addressed at her, he’s trying to fix the misguided notion of love he was taught was the norm in his childhood while forgiving — and accepting — his mother’s actions.

To explore this, it is important to dive more fully into violence as Foster depicts it in as literature as. Every time Vuong's mother hits him, she comes back asking for forgiveness — it'll be in the form of a plea that she "didn't mean it," reassurances that she loves him, or a physical token she knows Vuong will choose over harboring negative emotions towards her.

In spite of this, Vuong returns to his mother again and again throughout his life — even as he moves on into adulthood, realizes the freeing exhilaration of a first love, and when he accepts the damage that she has done to his being. However, he posits, the point isn't to cut yourself off from your parents entirely because this is also their first time living on Earth.

But how do we move on? We can say we will forgive them and heal ourselves from the damage they've inadvertently inflicted, but it is difficult. As Vuong asks his mother in the novel, "When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?" Names, places, and things will always have meaning attached to them so long as our memory holds, so it can seem like an impossible ask to move on from these memories. Even then, what should be left behind? Is is possible to leave behind childhood trauma without cutting off communication with those that caused it? Doesn't life have to have suffering in it, so where is the demarcation between "then" and "now"?

These questions remind me of Chihiro's parents in the film Spirited Away. They are by no means bad parents, but they do fail to recognize Chihiro's agency (their justification is that she's simply a kid) and don't respect her in the way they would have if she was an adult, and this partially causes their downfall: after discovering steaming bowls of food in an empty town, they eagerly eat it — even though there's no one there to serve them — after Chihiro makes evident her discomfort for doing so. It's not shown in this scene, but they eventually turn into pigs since the food is cursed. However, rather than viewing this simply as a cautionary tale against irrationally entertaining your indulgences, the fact that they turned into pigs might mean something more. When Chihiro returns to find them only to see them no longer in human form, they have very monstrous qualities. By caving into their desires, they realized the monsters they were at their core, in other words.

Of course, all of this rests upon the assumption that our parents will always be "monsters" — imperfect, flawed, and unable to anticipate how their every action will affect their children in the short- and long-term. These are human qualities, and consequently so long as our parents remain human (!), this is all unavoidable.

I think it can be easy to reject this label — "monsters." But, going back to Vuong's interpretation, a "monster" is "both shelter and warning at once." It is so much more encompassing than a term like "angel" because this places an insurmountable expectation on people to be perfect all the time. Monster is more grounded in what it means to be human — an experience ravaged by challenge and turmoil, but something in which we can still see the beauty of the world. Monsters only evoke the images of savagery because society upholds that idea of them as such, so what if we began viewing our parents not as angels or demons — conditions dependent on their treatment of us in our childhoods — but as fellow humans we can learn from, but never idolize?

Going back to the quote this post opened with, Vuong states that because he is also a monster, he can't turn away from his mother. What if he meant to say that because he is also a human, he can't turn away from his mother? What if he's saying that the best way to approach the most fragile and complicated relationships in our lives is through viewing the other person with empathy?

This sounds simple, but it is the reason he was able to write a whole novel to his mother when he's suffered more trauma at her hands than many people will ever have to experience. It is the reason he's been able to move on.🍂