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The unnamed narrator of “Black-Eyed Women.” The ghostwriter is plagued by the trauma she experienced as a thirteen-year-old while fleeing Vietnam on a refugee boat with the ghostwriter’s mother, the ghostwriter’s father, and the ghostwriter’s brother. Her brother had tried to disguise her as a boy, so that when pirates raided their boat, she would not be kidnapped like the other girls. When one pirate noticed that she was a girl, her brother had tried to protect her and was killed as a result. The ghostwriter was then raped by several men as her parents watched, unable to help her. Since that episode she has a difficult time going outside; she writes other people’s memoirs (like Victor Devoto’s) in her basement at night and sleeps during the day. She tries to forget this episode as much as she can, but twenty-five years after the day of her brother’s death, her dead brother appears as a ghost in her home. He helps her to heal by allowing her to grieve not only for his death, but also for the fact that she seemed to have died that day, too. She realizes that many people have stories like hers, and when she finishes Victor’s memoir, she resolves to write her own book of ghost stories: stories of the refugees who survived, but still lost so much. Thus, her arc demonstrates the cost of war and of being a refugee on an individual level.
The Ghostwriter Quotes in The Refugees
The The Refugees quotes below are all either spoken by The Ghostwriter or refer to The Ghostwriter. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Black-Eyed Women
Quotes
My American adolescence was filled with tales of woe like this, all of them proof of what my mother said, that we did not belong here. In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.
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I wept for him and for me, for all the years we could have had together but didn’t, for all the words never spoken between my mother, my father, and me. Most of all, I cried for those other girls who had vanished and never come back, including myself.
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Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.
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The Ghostwriter Quotes in The Refugees
The The Refugees quotes below are all either spoken by The Ghostwriter or refer to The Ghostwriter. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Black-Eyed Women
Quotes
My American adolescence was filled with tales of woe like this, all of them proof of what my mother said, that we did not belong here. In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
I wept for him and for me, for all the years we could have had together but didn’t, for all the words never spoken between my mother, my father, and me. Most of all, I cried for those other girls who had vanished and never come back, including myself.
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Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.
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