Summary Of The Refugees By Nguyen

In Nguyen’s The Refugees, the title chaptered “Black-eyed women”, the narrator’s encounter with her brother’s ghost brings back the trauma of an identity she has been trying to repress for more than twenty-five years. Her brother ghost has not left because the narrator has not forgotten her trauma of seeing her brother get killed and her traumatic experience of being raped, the narrator states, “I had not forgotten our nameless blue boat and it had not forgotten me, the red eyes painted on either side of its prow having never ceased to stare me down” (14). When her brother visits the second time, she expresses her doubt about why she lived and why he died and he states, “You died too. You just don’t know it” (17). Her brother’s death and her victimization caused her to die emotionally and
The narrator is a professional writer but she refuses to put her name on any of her works so it is like if she doesn’t even exist as a part of society. It goes back to the idea that her brother said she also died as well. She is existing in the world but not living her life, which in a sense makes her a ghost. The narrator identity depends on her brother and his reappearance after twenty-five years as a ghost indicates that he is a figment of her memories and he cannot die because he shaped her into the woman that she is now. When the narrator begins to cry, it is a recognition of the life she could have had with her family alive and about all the other girls who died like her, “Most of all, I cried for those other girls who had vanished and never come back, including myself” (18). She indicates that she has never come back which suggests that like her brother, she also died on the ocean. At the end of her story, she states, “I go hunting for the ghosts, something I can do without ever leaving home. As they haunt our country, so do we haunt theirs”