Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen Refugee Series # 3

                                                       

                                                       

Pulitzer Winner, Vietnamese American novelist short story collection is titled as Refugees and the first story in the collection is titled as ‘Black-Eyed Women’. The story is about a nameless ghostwriter who is haunted by his memories from the past. The book is dedicated to all the refugees, everywhere. The two quotes given at the beginning of the book is quite relevant to the theme of the book. 

‘I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time’ 

Roberto Bolano - Antwerp 

It is not your memories which haunt you

It is not what you have written down

It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.

What you must go on forgetting all your life

  James Fenton - A German Requiem 

The narrator is a ghostwriter and her mother is happy about the fact that her name doesn’t appear in the book. She tells her a Vietnamese story about a reporter who was tortured for writing a newspaper report about the torture inflicted by the government on the people. Her mother is the connecting link between American and Vietnam. The narrator and her mother shared a passion for words, ‘I preferred the silence of writing, while she loved to talk’. Her mother kept on recollecting stories and gossip and her favourite kind of story was the ghost story. One day the mother says that she has seen the ghost of her brother standing in the living room, water dripping from his clothes. Narrators had died in the Vietnamese seas when the refugee boat in which they were travelling was attacked by the pirates. In a way, he died saving the narrator. There is a feeling of guilt that haunts the narrator. She says that ‘his eyes stared at me whenever I closed my own’.  The writer herself led a ghost-like life sleeping throughout the day and waking up at night for ghostwriting the life of someone else. The title of the story ‘black-eyed women refers to ‘the ancient crones who chewed betel nut who sat in the market and who had loads of stories to tell about the Korean, Japanese, American invasion of Vietnam. The story ends with the narrator facing the ghosts from her past including her brother’s ghost and taking up a writing assignment which is a book of her own.