The Refugees

The unnamed narrator of “Black-Eyed Women” is a 38-year-old woman working as a ghostwriter and living with her widowed mother in an unspecified American city. She and her family immigrated to the United States when she was 13, following the Vietnam War. They were “Boat People,” refugees forced to make the dangerous crossing of the Pacific Ocean to escape the conditions in postwar Vietnam. The narrator’s brother was killed and she was raped during a pirate attack. The unresolved trauma from the rape, her brother’s murder, and her parents’ unwillingness to address the incident in any way haunts her to the present day. The narrator shuns daylight because it reminds her of the assault, preferring a cloistered, nocturnal life.

The narrator’s job as a ghostwriter keeps her in the background; she is never credited for her work. She tells other people’s “ghost stories” without ever getting to tell her own; this silence reinforces her trauma, which she tries in vain to bottle up for 25 years. When the ghost of her 15-year-old brother appears in their home, she is given an opportunity “exorcize” the past that haunts her. While her mother imposes silence on the narrator’s trauma, she deals with her own trauma by telling supernatural stories.