By Jorden Enderton
While most ghost stories in North America center around horror, those found in Vietnamese culture most often center around spiritualism and remaining connected to one’s ancestors. In his short story “Black-Eyed Women,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen connects the tradition of passing down ghost stories of your ancestors with themes of grief, family, and overwhelming expectations. Nguyen argues in this story that avoiding the traumatic and difficult experiences of your childhood can significantly impact you in life as you get older. By discussing themes of survivor’s guilt, expectations placed onto us by our parents, and using other people’s trauma to avoid your own, Nguyen encourages his audience to face these experiences head on in order to grow from them instead of letting them negatively impact themselves in the future.
Firstly, Nguyen tells the story of the unnamed narrator’s traumatic childhood in order to present why she has immense survivor’s guilt over the death of her brother, who died protecting her from pirates attacking the ship their family used to flee Vietnam after the war. Throughout the story, the narrator feels as if her brother could have done much more with his life than she has done with her life. She “ask(s)… how [she] lived and he died” and feels as if she is undeserving of life. The ghost of her brother shows himself to her in order to give her closure on what happened in the past. They have a conversation in which the brother says that he hasn’t moved onto the next world because he wants the narrator to stop feeling guilty over something that she had no control over. After visiting her, the ghost of the narrator’s brother is able to give her closure and allows her to move on from the past. As she does, the narrator is able to escape feeling guilty about the fact that she lived and is able to enjoy her writing career more as well as talk with her mother about their past more easily. By discussing survivor’s guilt, Nguyen supports his argument of facing your traumas and growing from them by showing how getting closure and accepting the unchangeable events of the past can free your mind from the burden of guilt that is placed on it by trying to forget them.
Additionally, Nguyen talks about the overwhelming expectations that children of Asian immigrants face and how that can affect their sense of self when they get older. As a child, the narrator was one of the hardest workers in her school and because of this, she received private English lessons from her teacher. However, as an adult, the narrator begins to feel inadequate and like she can’t live up to her mom’s expectations of her. Over the years, these expectations have worn her down. For example, the narrator’s mom is worried that when she dies, no one will attend her funeral. She says to the narrator that, “‘[the narrator’s] brother would have known what to do…That’s what sons are for.” This statement leaves the narrator of the story speechless, and in her mind she agrees with her mom. She compares herself to her brother and feels as if it would have been better if he was alive, which also ties into the previous theme of survivor’s guilt. The narrator instills thoughts of self doubt into herself and lacks self confidence due to her feeling like she is not as good of a daughter as she was before; that she did not live up to her potential. Once she accepts the fact that she does not have to always live up to her mother’s expectations and stops comparing herself to her brother, the narrator is able to get along with her mother better and even listens to more of her mother’s ghost stories. Nguyen uses this plot development in order to show how we shouldn’t let our parents’ expectations of us turn into thoughts of self-doubt and a lack of self-confidence. He also shows that we should not compare our current selves to our past selves and to those around us.
The last way that Nguyen argues his point is by showing how the narrator of the story avoids talking about her own trauma by writing about someone else’s. The narrator points out that “it (is) ironic, then, that [she] made a living from being a ghostwriter.” This is in reference to her writing about someone else’s war trauma while actively avoiding her own as a refugee of the Vietnam War. She tries to forget about the past since it causes her immense pain, however, this affects her well into her adulthood as she feels like “this apparition was the first consequence of what [her] mother considered [her] unnatural nature, childless and single.” By showing how the narrator feels about herself and why she thinks her brother has come to visit her, Nguyen exposes the consequences of trying to forget difficult experiences. After meeting the ghost of her brother and finding closure on the most traumatic experience of her life, the narrator intends to write ghost stories, presumably inspired by her own experiences, instead of writing about other people’s trauma. She grows as a person and finds a more meaningful purpose within her job after she accepts what happened in her past, integrating rather than avoiding her traumas.
Evidently, Nguyen advocates for his audience to face the difficult and traumatic experiences in their lives in order to prevent them from weighing themselves down. Through the use of storytelling and by discussing the themes of survivor’s guilt, overbearing expectations, and using someone else’s trauma to avoid your own, Nguyen shows just how much these experiences can negatively affect us when we are older. In order to move on, we must face the pain of our past, which Nguyen expertly argues in his short story, “Black-Eyed Women.”
Jorden Enderton is a Vietnamese American student and aspiring musician from Orange County. She is currently an undergraduate at Chapman University and is studying music performance and technology. In the future, she hopes to produce and perform music that will connect with people all across the globe.