Journal Entry 5 PDF

Preview

Summary

Journal Entry 5...

Description

The short story “Black-Eyed Women” is within the book The Refugees, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen. The narrator of the short story, who remains unnamed throughout, is a Vietnamese American woman in her late thirties who works as a ghostwriter telling other people’s survival stories. She has lived in silence with her mother for a good amount of time and likes to write in the dark in the middle of the night, preferring not to go outside if she can help it. Her life is small and quiet, conducted primarily in front of the computer screen, with little excitement or terror except in the stories she writes. She shares similar qualities with other refugees. Those refugees may have died internally during the process of finding asylum, but have proven otherwise that they are still living externally. Despite her later occupation as a ghostwriter, the narrator was afraid of ghost stories as a child, the scariest of which was the very real horrors of war and colonialism that her father shared with her. She is a medium for the dead, but her own life is in stasis: single, solitary, her mother even tells her she is afraid to die because she “won’t even go outside to shop for groceries.” She feels survivor's guilt over the death of her older brother, who was killed while trying to protect her from pirates. Her brother's unexpected return as a ghost allows the narrator to find some resolution after years of struggling with the loss. She finally confronts the trauma and violence that has shadowed her life until now.“Why did I live and you die?” she asks her brother. “‘You died too,’ he said. ‘You just didn’t know it.’” It is the last time they speak. He leaves, but she stays, made anew by the knowledge that writing ghost stories is a way of writing about herself. She then decides to stop ghostwriting and write her own book of modern ghost stories.

1

2...