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Professor Khanh/The Professor
The mother of the ghostwriter in “Black-Eyed Women.” Following the ghostwriter’s father’s death, the ghostwriter’s mother moved in with the ghostwriter. Like the ghostwriter, she has been heavily traumatized by her experience as a refugee. She loves gossip and ghost stories, but she refuses to speak about her own experience fleeing Vietnam, having lost her son (the ghostwriter’s brother) and having watched the ghostwriter get raped on the deck of their refugee boat. In the end, like the ghostwriter, she must confront these losses and help her daughter to move forward by creating a nightly ritual in which the ghostwriter’s mother tells her “ghost stories” about the refugees and the pieces of their lives that were lost as a result of the war.
The Ghostwriter’s Mother Quotes in The Refugees
The The Refugees quotes below are all either spoken by The Ghostwriter’s Mother or refer to The Ghostwriter’s Mother. 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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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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Get the entire The Refugees LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Ghostwriter’s Mother Quotes in The Refugees
The The Refugees quotes below are all either spoken by The Ghostwriter’s Mother or refer to The Ghostwriter’s Mother. 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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
