Q3

Text 3 — Prose fiction extract
How does Ocean Vuong represent the relationship between the characters?

Text 3 — Prose fiction extract
With Lan, one of my tasks was to take a pair of tweezers and pluck, one by
one, the grey hairs from her head. “The snow in my hair,” she explained, “it
makes my head itch. Will you pluck my itchy hairs, Little Dog? The snow
is rooting into me.” She slid a pair of tweezers between my fingers, “Make
Grandma young today, okay?” she said real quiet, grinning.
For this work I was paid in stories. After positioning her head under the
window’s light, I would kneel on a pillow behind her, the tweezers ready
in my grip. She would start to talk, her tone dropping an octave, drifting
deep into a narrative. Mostly, as was her way, she rambled, the tales cycling
one after another. They spiraled out from her mind only to return the next
week with the same introduction: “Now this one, Little Dog, this one will
really take you out. You ready? Are you even interested in what I’m saying?
Good. Because I never lie.” A familiar story would follow, punctuated with
the same dramatic pauses and inflections during moments of suspense or
crucial turns. I’d mouth along with the sentences, as if watching a film for
the umpteenth time—a movie made by Lan’s words and animated by my
imagination. In this way, we collaborated.
As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical
landscapes as open into them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past
behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient
ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat* who were paid in jugs of rice wine,
who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on
palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.
OCEAN VUONG
Extract from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Reproduced with permission from Penguin Random House, UK

• Da Lat a city in Vietnam