119 pages • 3 hours read
Viet Thanh NguyenA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
“I was the best student in my school, excellent enough for my teacher to teach me English after hours, lessons I shared with my brother. He, in turn, told me tall tales, folklore, and rumors. When airplanes shrieked overhead and we huddled with my mother in the bunker, he whispered ghost stories into my ear to distract me. Except, he insisted, they were not ghost stories. They were historical accounts from reliable sources, the ancient crones who chewed betel nut and spat its red juice while squatting on their haunches in the market, tending coal stoves or overseeing baskets of wares.”
The black-eyed women are sources of folklore and keepers of oral tradition. The narrator and her brother bond over the stories the brother relays from these women. By the end of the story, the narrator and her mother carry on the tradition of passing along ghost stories as a way of preserving cultural memory and healing from trauma.
“You died too,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”
The narrator reaches an epiphany about the trauma she endured when she was sexually assaulted by a pirate. Trauma has frozen her in time; she has metaphorically died. This implies that she is a ghost like her brother, even though she is still alive.
“Sometimes this is how stories come to me, through her. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ she would say, once, twice, or perhaps three times. More often, though, I go hunting for the ghosts, something I can do without ever leaving home. As they haunt our country, so do we haunt theirs. They are pallid creatures, more frightened of us than we are of them. That is why we see these shades so rarely, and why we must seek them out.”
The narrator’s attitude toward ghosts at the end of the story allows her to feel more empathetic about her own past. The fact that she can hunt for ghosts without leaving home means she is mining her past for the traumatic experiences that make up these ghost stories. By telling these stories, she can “exorcize” the “ghosts” she held onto in her years of silence.
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
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