Memory and Ghosts Theme Analysis

Since many of the characters in The Refugees deal with past traumas and former lives, an obsession with memories and a connection to ghosts play a large role in Nguyen’s stories. In each episode, characters are haunted—sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. However, in Nguyen’s stories, memory and ghosts are not simply representative of the past: they also represent the characters’ future possibilities and lives that were taken from them.

“Black-Eyed Women,” Nguyen’s first story in the collection, centers on a woman who is haunted both by her brother’s ghost and by the experiences that she had to endure in order to make it to America—but primarily by the ghost of who she might have been. The narrator of this short story, whose name is never revealed, is introduced simply as a “ghostwriter”—a person who is hired to write literary works that are officially credited to another person as the author. This sets up this character’s primary conflict, which is that she often feels absent from her own life, just as her name is absent from the body of work that she produces. This sentiment of feeling like a ghost is exacerbated by the fact that the ghostwriter is literally haunted by the ghost of her older brother. The narrator’s brother died on a refugee boat trying to protect her from pirates, who killed him and raped her in response. She is unable to confront both traumas, and as a result, she essentially turns into a ghost herself, refusing to go out in the daytime and growing paler every year. The ghost of her brother acknowledges this, saying to her that when he died, she died too and simply did not know it. In conversing with her brother, the ghostwriter gains some closure in finally grieving for his life and her own life. She realizes how the things she has lost have come to define her, and particularly emphasizes that the most painful losses are the years that she and her brother might have had, and the lives of the many other refugees who were killed on the same boat and were robbed of their future.

In “War Years,” a similar loss defines the community and families at the center of the narrative, as they confront the memories of the people they have had to leave behind. Some families, like the narrator’s family, try to move on, while others remain haunted by the uncertainty of their future. The narrator of “War Years” is a young boy living in San Jose, California, which has become a home to many Vietnamese refugees. They have a difficult time rebuilding their past lives, as they realize that their community is merely an echo of the country they once called home, and the prospect of regaining their lives in Vietnam is hopeless. This is why when Mrs. Hoa, another Vietnamese refugee, extorts money from other refugees to support a small Vietnamese guerilla army training in Thailand, the boy’s mother refuses to spend money to try to fight the Communists, believing that it is instead necessary to focus on their future in America. Nguyen reveals later that Mrs. Hoa lost her husband and her two sons to the war. However, she does not know whether her husband and one of her sons have actually died—as far as she knows, they are simply missing. Her efforts to support the war, then, stem from a desire to relieve herself of being haunted by their memories, and by the possibility that they might one day return to her life.

In several other stories, characters are haunted by the other potential lives they might have led. In “Fatherland,” Phuong views her older half-sister, Vivien, as a ghost of herself. Vivien was able to escape Vietnam and go to America, while Phuong was forced to remain. When her sister visits Vietnam many years later, Phuong realizes that Vivien leads a life that she herself might have led. In “I’d Love You to Want Me,” Mrs. Khanh’s husband, Professor Khanh, begins to lose his memory to Alzheimer’s Disease, and he starts to call his wife by a different name—Yen. She gradually relents to this false name, realizing that in order to make her husband feel sane, she has to relinquish a future in which she retains her identity. “Someone Else Besides You” centers on Thomas and his ex-wife, Sam. Prior to the story’s opening, Thomas had been unable to commit to having children with Sam, and so their marriage had fizzled. But after they have broken up and he sees that she is pregnant, he is haunted by the opportunity he lost and tells her that he wants to be the father of her child.

At the end of her narrative, the ghostwriter resolves to author her own book—writing “ghost stories” like hers and many others’. In a way, she therefore becomes a stand-in for Nguyen. In crafting this series of narratives, Nguyen unveils many of the characters’ ghost stories: they are haunted by the past and by what they have lost, but even more so by the possibility of what they might have become.