By Justine Trinh
In my copy of Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke, Eric Tran signed and inscribed my copy with, “Be lousy and bloated with love.” I was intrigued. I wondered: what does it look like to be lousy? Is it possible to be lousy when society casts Asian Americans as the model minority?
When I received this book, I was struggling with the pressure of hyperproductivity and how I needed to write and read and teach and tutor and grade, among all the other things in my life I needed to do. And while I love to do all these things, I could feel my love for them chisel away as I allocated time to do those things which left no time for myself. This imperative to “be lousy and bloated with love” felt so foreign to me. It is only now that I finished the collection that I can understand the context of Tran’s words. The words “I am lousy and bloated / with love” are from the last poem of Tran’s collection and are a grief response to death as he writes “I’m so angry / I write down everyone’s birthday. / So angry I demand unending hugs.” It is easy to get caught up with these so-called necessities that are not real necessities at all, that we lose time with those that do matter.
Death underscores this poetry collection as it focuses on the grief of losing a lover to
addiction while simultaneously discussing the intoxicating nature of pleasure and desire. Broken into four sections of ten to fifteen poems each, Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke explores a variety of themes including loneliness, grief, medicine, the body, and vulnerability, and shows how these topics are enmeshed and intersect with queerness and identity. Tran, a resident physician in psychiatry at the Mountain Area Health Education Center and a queer Vietnamese American poet, presents his readers with multiple dualities such as: life or death; medicine or pleasure; and grief or intimacy. We often think of medicine as something that cures and prolongs life, but medicine can also kill. Similarly, grief and pleasure seem like concepts on opposite sides of a spectrum, but both originate from intimacy as we grieve and find pleasure with those close to us.
Tran’s work emphasizes the body. The body is something everyone can understand, yet our societal understanding of the body is also contradictory. Tran highlights this in “Portraits of Handwashing.” In this poem, hands are our point of contact with the world. They can save lives, such as the nurse’s hands that “just held a pink, wailing newborn, or palmed a syringe of adrenaline for another patient’s stilled heart,” but they can also kill people with how they “carry so many weary travelers” in the form of germs. The hands that built a kite out of chopsticks and printer paper are the same ones that “slapped [the narrator] down to kitchen tile and then bruised [his] bruise.” Our hands that create things and heal and hold have the equal potential to hurt and destroy, yet these actions with our hands are intimate. Holding that baby is just as intimate as slapping one’s child to the ground—both grounded in touch and interacting with another person.
In addition to the body, Tran also discusses the diasporic Vietnamese American experience. The first poem, “My Father Worries War is Coming,” brings up queerness in relation to loneliness and the aftermath of war. When the narrator tells his father that he is dating a man, the father responds that “if [his son] is so lonely, he’d drive across the country to live with [him].” While the father equates the narrator’s queerness to loneliness, Tran moves the focus onto the father and the loss the war incurred as the narrator ruminates if his father’s sister’s photo is lonely at the temple. The narrator and his father are unable to take the photo, and thus the sister is separated from her family even after death. Tran compares this separation to the disconnect the narrator’s lovers feel with the narrator as the lovers are never able to see these family pictures and the disconnect between the narrator and his father because he “has never seen a photo of the narrator with the man [he] loves.”
Yet this father is the same one who hurts his son in the second “My Father Worries War is Coming” that appears in the fourth section. This poem focuses on the father’s life after the war and resettlement. We learn the father is a mechanic and on Sundays, he eats scrambled eggs with soy sauce, which are both a testament to his continued survival following the war. He is able to have a life despite the war in which he can enjoy something as simple as eggs. Yet regardless these mundane actions, we know based on the title that the father is still experiencing war trauma and hits his son with the back of his hand and his fist. This echoes the sentiments of Ocean Vuong when he states in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, “Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.” This is not to excuse the violence that occurs but rather to state the origin of such actions. The war continues to affect those who lived it and their children who experience it through intergenerational trauma.
If I am being honest, I struggle with poetry. My poetry knowledge spans from ancient Roman love poems (mostly by the poet, Catullus, who is most known for its tumultuous love affair with Lesbia rather than his queer poems about his male lovers) to a high school unit about the “Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock” and the “Red Wheelbarrow.” This is just to say, I do not know much about poetry. Yet regardless of my lack of experience, I found myself hooked on Tran’s work. I read poem after poem, wanting more and ruminating on the meaning and purpose of each word. I loved how Tran interwove these concepts of medicine, queerness, love, and intimacy to reveal universal realities of life and death that we all face, whether that be the loss of a lover/friend or the yearning for more. But if I were to take one thing away from this book, it would be the advice, “Be lousy and bloated with love.”
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.