Ocean Vuong raises the question of whose stories are heard in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: Vuong premises the story with a never-to-be-read letter to the narrator’s mother – Little Dog is a writer while his mother is illiterate. The protagonist, a queer Vietnamese immigrant navigating post-Vietnam War US society, struggles to be seen and acknowledged within his relationships and society at large. By retelling stories of his mother and grandmother, he destabilizes prevailing US-societal narratives of the war, offering an alternative perspective. Within Little Dog’s transformative queer sexual and romantic encounter with Trevor, he experiences visibility and beauty for the first time, enabling him to develop an oriented sense of self rooted in self-recognition. The intersection of this queer experience, his racial-ethnic identity, and his upbringing cultivates a sense of belonging within the queer Asian American community. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation as spatial, the following essay argues that writing from this perspective orients readers towards a different experience and story of space, namely the U.S. nation-state, realms of trauma and home, and the embodied resistance, agency, and self-representation of the protagonist.