sorry

 excerpts from on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

the most common english word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. it was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. again and again, i watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, "i'm sorry. i'm sorry. i'm so, so sorry," when they had done nothing wrong. i have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip-- only to say sorry anyway when none was given.

in the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. it no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: i'm here, right here, beneath you. it is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. in the nail salon, one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. because the mouth must eat.

and yet it's not only so in the nail salon, ma. in those tobacco fields, too, we said it. "lo siento," manny would utter as he walked across mr. buford's field of vision. "lo siento," rigo whispered as he reached to place a machete back on the wall where buford sat ticking off numbers on a clipboard. "lo siento," i said to the boss after missing a day when lan had another schizophrenic attack and had shoved all her clothes into the oven, saying she had to get rid of the "evidence." "lo siento," we said when, one day, night arrived only to find the field half harvested, the tractor, its blown-out engine, sitting in the stilled dark. "lo siento, senor," each of us said as we walked past the truck with buford inside blasting hank williams and staring at his withered crop, a palm-sized photo of ronald reagan taped to the dash. how the day after, we began work not with "good morning" but with "lo siento." the phrase with its sound of a bootstep sinking, then lifted, from mud. the slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. again and again, i write to you regretting my tongue. 

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what do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? a martyr? a weakling? no, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. yes, the period in the sentence -- it's what makes us human, ma, i swear. it lets us stop in order to keep going. 

because submission, i soon learned, was also a kind of power. 

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let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, i said to myself.

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i'm not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck -- the pieces floating, finally legible.

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later, i would learn that this was a common scene on a saigon night. city coroners, underfunded, don't always work around the clock. when someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. as a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called "delaying sadness." 

in saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death -- or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.

it's through the drag performers' explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. as much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is till a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. because grief, at its worst, is unreal. and it calls for a surreal response. the queens - in this way - are unicorns.

unicorns stamping in a graveyard