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.
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. This initially appears to be a morbid fixation, but the narrator comes to realize that by expressing these stories, her mother maintains a connection with her culture in exile.
While ghostwriting the story of Victor, a man who lost his family in a plane crash, the narrator gains insight into how to deal with her own “ghosts.” Her brother’s ghost visits her not for closure for his own unfinished business but for the narrator’s. She has been unable to properly mourn him due to her own trauma holding her back. His visitation gives her permission to grieve for herself, her brother, and the other girls who were raped and kidnapped on that fatal day. By the end of the story, the narrator takes her place as a storyteller, like her mother, by starting to write a collection of ghost stories under her own name. Ending her career as an anonymous ghostwriter and telling her own story helps legitimize her trauma, providing a path to healing. In this way, she, like her mother, is linked with the black-eyed old women who were the keepers of ghost stories in their village in Vietnam.
The protagonist of “The Other Man,” Liem is an 18-year-old Vietnamese refugee who moves to San Francisco after leaving Vietnam. Liem grew up in a rural area near Long Xuyen; he was the first of his family to travel outside the area when his parents sent him to Saigon to work. Liem worked in a tea shop, sending money back home to help support his family. Along the way, he picked up rudimentary English from American soldiers. He goes to America with the blessing of his parents—and the hope that he will make more money to send back home. In America, he is fostered by Parrish Coyne, a gay man who lives with his partner, Marcus Chan.
Liem struggles to reconcile two sides of his identity: the dutiful son of a conservative, Vietnamese family and a gay man in a brand-new culture. Liem undergoes the typical struggles of an English learner, but these are compounded by his attempts to understand his sponsors, particularly Marcus. To Liem, Marcus appears almost as an idealized version of himself: fluent in English, at home in American society, and comfortable with his sexuality. Liem is driven by his impulse to be good, and this causes him conflict when he is confronted by his growing feelings for Marcus and the expectations his parents set for him. When Liem and Marcus have sex while Parrish is gone on a trip, Liem is not concerned about being the “other man” in Parrish and Marcus’s relationship, but he is concerned about whether or not he can view himself as good. His story is left in a state of ambiguity, though the image of him waving to a male couple on the street implies he will be accepted into his new society.
The narrator of “War Years” is a teenage boy whose parents run a Vietnamese grocery store in a rough part of San Jose, California. In interviews, Nguyen has stated that “War Years” is based on his own experiences growing up in San Jose, meaning the narrator is partially an analog to Nguyen’s teenage self. The narrator lives the split life of a Generation 1.5 adolescent. Born in Vietnam but living in America since an early age, the narrator is rapidly assimilating into American culture. He longs for things associated with a “normal” American experience and consumes everything American, from Star Wars to TV dinners. He loves school and practicing English in supplemental classes.
The narrator’s affinity for American culture causes dissonance between him and his parents. For example, the narrator opens the door to a stranger because he blindly trusts people speaking English. He lacks the distrust his mother harbors in their new country. This proves to be a mistake: The man attempts to rob them, and the narrator’s mother is nearly shot. While he remains close to them and largely obedient, he cannot help but feel sorry for his parents and their adherence to Vietnamese culture, which begins to mark them as foreign to him. The narrator is conflicted by his mother’s interactions with Mrs. Hoa; because he agrees with the anti-communist sentiment of 1980s America, he feels that her cause is just. However, through the course of the story, he begins to build a more complex form of empathy for both his parents, whose parsimony is derived from their struggle as immigrants, and Mrs. Hoa, who is a victim of the war in a deeper way than his own family.
The narrator’s mother is the protagonist of “War Years.” Until Mrs. Hoa becomes involved in their life, the narrator’s mother is a completely predictable woman, even down to her color-coded daily attire. She is a frugal woman by necessity: New Saigon, the Vietnamese Grocery store the family runs, operates on a very tight profit margin. This parsimonious attitude is derived from the fact that their family was well-to-do in Vietnam but lost everything when they fled the country when the South fell to communism. This also led to the mother’s distrust of the stability of society. She and her husband stash money and other valuables in hidden spots throughout the house.
The narrator’s mother fears the foreignness of American society; where her son is open to assimilation, she is more comfortable in San Jose’s Vietnamese enclave. Despite this, she is an outspoken woman, willing to risk everything to stand up for her principles. When the family is nearly robbed, she runs screaming onto the street, later claiming that she saved the family and calling her husband a coward even though he tackled the invader. She is the only person in the community to stand up to Mrs. Hoa, who bullies people into donating money to her anti-communist cause.
Mrs. Hoa, the sympathetic antagonist in “War Years,” comes across as a pushy, flashy woman in the Vietnamese community in “War Years.” Though the Vietnam War ended years ago, Mrs. Hoa, like some community members, holds onto the hope that the remaining anti-communist forces in Vietnam, surrounding countries, and even a secret militant group in the United States can topple the communist government. Mrs. Hoa becomes a disrupting force in the narrator’s life when she begins asking for donations for the anti-communist forces and the narrator’s mother refuses. This causes a feud between the two women, culminating in Mrs. Hoa publicly accusing the narrator’s mother of being a communist sympathizer, jeopardizing the family’s business and reputation.
Mrs. Hoa’s zeal comes from her trauma from the war years. While the narrator’s father was able to escape the draft through bribery, Mr. Hoa was drafted and never seen again. Mrs. Hoa lost her eldest son in battle, and her younger son remains missing. Mrs. Hoa remains in denial, adamant that her husband and son are alive. She channels her inability to help them into her tailoring business, where she sews uniforms for the anti-communist forces, imagining that she is helping her husband and son. The narrator realizes that, beneath her veneer, Mrs. Hoa is deeply hurt, aging, and deserving of sympathy. Mrs. Hoa also reveals a different facet of the Vietnamese immigration experience, one characterized by more loss and poverty than some of the others in this collection.
Arthur Arellano is the hapless protagonist of “The Transplant.” Part of a multigenerational Mexican American family, Arthur and his wife, Norma, have little to do with their roots, speaking less Spanish than their Korean dry cleaners, who immigrated to Argentina before coming to the United States. Arthur is slow on the uptake and selfish, unable to recognize the effect his behavior has on others, especially his wife, who kicks him out for neglecting her needs. Arthur is a compulsive gambler and, before the beginning of the story, lost his and Norma’s home to his gambling debts. This caused a cascade of disruptions in Arthur’s life. Big Art, Arthur’s father, left his company to Arthur’s brother, Martin because Arthur was unreliable.
Arthur strikes up an unlikely friendship with Louis Vu after Arthur receives a liver transplant after a hepatitis diagnosis. Arthur, who is ignorant of Asian cultures and usually assumes most Asian people are Chinese, finds Louis in the phonebook after the hospital leaks that Louis’s new liver came from a deceased man named Men Vu. Arthur bonds with Louis over Vietnamese food, which Arthur comes to love. Arthur naively allows Louis to stash bootleg designer goods in his house out of a misguided sense of gratitude to Louis’s “father.” However, when it is revealed by Minh Vu, Men’s real son, that Louis is not who he says he is, Arthur confronts Louis and ends their friendship. By the end of the story, Arthur is lost; his materialistic nature prevents him from having a good relationship with Martin, he has lost his only real friend due to pride, and he has nothing to offer Norma.
Posing as the son of Men Vu, the deceased man whose liver Arthur received, Louis Vu is a con artist who befriends Arthur Arellano in “The Transplant.” Louis envisions a future in which he lives off the profit of his current hustles. He owns several houses, but he rents them out to pay off the mortgages and lives instead in a cramped apartment. He sells bootleg luxury items, which he refers to as “better than genuine” (68).
Arthur’s trust in Louis and his sense of debt to Men Vu allows Louis to stash his supply in Arthur’s garage. Louis offers Arthur a share in the profit, though Arthur refuses. Louis is a man who takes any interesting opportunity that crosses his path, so, when Arthur contacted him after finding his name in the phonebook, Louis pretended to be Men’s son. When Arthur finds out, he views this as a betrayal and ends their friendship. Louis threatens Arthur that if he reports him for counterfeiting or does anything with his supply, he will report Arthur’s brother for employing undocumented immigrants. By including Louis, a scammer, in The Refugees, Nguyen avoids flattening refugees and immigrants into a monolithic stereotype; some are hard-working, like the parents in “War Years,” and others are self-serving like Louis.
Sa Khanh is the protagonist of “I’d Love You to Want Me.” She is referred to just as Mrs. Khanh throughout the text, reflective of the fact that she and her husband, Professor Khanh, rarely referred to each other by name throughout their long marriage. She and Professor Khanh had an arranged marriage, and she suspects that she was not the love of his life. Despite this, Mrs. Khanh is a devoted wife and mother. This devotion is put to the test when Mr. Khanh develops Alzheimer’s, and his memory begins to deteriorate. For the first time in her life, she is struck by jealousy when Professor Khanh begins to mistakenly call her Yen.
Mrs. Khanh came to America with her husband and five children as refugees from the Vietnam War. As boat people, the family was in danger of dying of thirst, yet Mrs. Khanh used this as an opportunity to instruct her children on the importance of decorum. This emphasis on decorum extends to her attempts to correct Professor Khanh’s erratic behavior. Mrs. Khanh’s devotion overcomes her jealousy when she essentially sacrifices her future to take care of her husband in his decline.
James Carver (referred to just as Carver) is the protagonist of “The Americans.” He is an aging, Black Air Force veteran who returns to Vietnam many years after the war with his wife, Michiko, to visit their daughter, Claire, who has lived there for two years. Carver is a stubborn man whose views of the world are influenced by his experience in the war. Carver harbors a mistrust of the military-industrial complex, evident in the way he hassles Claire’s boyfriend, Khoi Legaspi, about the funding and potential use of his robotics projects. Nonetheless, Carver still harbors a great love for flying; for him, it is a quasi-religious experience, the greatest form of freedom imaginable. This love for flight also symbolizes his aloofness as a father and his negative character trait of viewing himself as above others.
Carver is a man who is used to being in control of any given situation, so he feels his body is betraying him as he ages. Carver likely suffers from PTSD from trauma suffered during his time in the war as a B-52 bomber pilot, responsible, as Claire reminds him, for the deaths of thousands. He buried this trauma under a veneer of control and practicality, but his rigid, stubborn personality prevents him from seeing eye-to-eye with Claire. It nearly costs him his life; when he storms away during an argument with Claire, he contracts pneumonia from a downpour. Carver recognizes his own foolishness when it is almost too late, though this allows him the chance to reconcile with his daughter.
Claire is the adult daughter of James and Michiko Carver. Unlike her brother, William, who followed in their father's footsteps and joined the Air Force, Claire exhibited a rebellious nature from early childhood. Claire teaches English in a poverty-stricken region of Vietnam. As a half-Black, half-Asian woman growing up in America, Claire never felt like she fit in. She was bullied by people in school due to her racial ambiguity, leading Carver to sometimes regret bringing her into the world due to the harshness of life.
Claire has a complicated relationship with her father, mostly because of their conflicting ideals. Growing up, she harbored great guilt for her father's involvement in the Vietnam War. During an argument, she reminds him of the many people he must have killed during his bombing campaigns, and she tells her father that it is part of her life's mission to make up for some of that damage by doing good in Vietnam. However, her attitude toward her father stems partially from his withholding nature; he did not talk about his experiences in Vietnam. Because of this, Claire grew up with a skewed view of her father; as he sees it, she has empathy for everyone in the world except for him. Claire reconciles with Carver when it is almost too late, taking care of him in the Vietnamese hospital when he contracts pneumonia. She is able to see vulnerability in her aging father for the first time and, at last, has empathy for him.
Thomas is the protagonist and narrator of “Someone Else Besides You.” Thomas is in his early thirties and lives with his father, Mr. P, who he invited to move in after his mother died of an aneurysm. Thomas’s chief characteristic—and main flaw—is his indecisiveness, which cost him his marriage with Sam and causes conflict with his father. Thomas is insecure about his masculinity and his ability to be a good father because of his strict upbringing. Consequently, he did not want to have children with Sam, fearing he would turn out like his father.
Mr. P claims that Thomas does not know the difference between right and wrong because he fails to take action. Thomas takes on two jobs following his divorce and his mother’s death, which would seem to indicate that he is industrious. However, he does so merely to occupy his time, with his night job as a security guard serving as a way to avoid dealing with his issues. Seeing Sam pregnant reminds him of the future they could have had together had he not run away from it. While the declaration that he wants to be the child’s father could indicate a degree of maturity, it could just as easily mean that he has no idea what to do with his life, mistaking impulse for his father’s idea of action.
Thomas’s father in “Someone Else Besides You,” Mr. P, raised Thomas like a drill Sergeant, forcing Thomas and his siblings up early in the mornings for exercise and calisthenic drills. Mr. P is a complex man, a former southern Vietnamese paratrooper who fled the country due to his fear of being persecuted. He claims that he cannot return to Vietnam because he will be killed by the communist government or sent to a reeducation camp. Mr. P is in his sixties and is still muscular and fit. He is shorter than Thomas, but he is strong. When Thomas was in school, Mr. P beat up the father of a boy who bullied Thomas. This also demonstrates his protective nature—a side of his father that Thomas fails to acknowledge.
Mr. P has a complicated notion of right and wrong. On the one hand, he berates Thomas for his inability to act, claiming that this means he has no idea of the difference between right and wrong. On the other hand, he cheated on his wife with various mistresses and girlfriends. When Thomas confronts him about this, Mr. P reveals that he never actually loved Thomas’s mother. He respected her due to her loyalty and her sense of responsibility to her family, but theirs was an arranged marriage, and Mr. P loved another woman. While some of his actions are misguided and morally questionable, such as vandalizing Sam's car, Mr. P does care about Thomas, and in his own way, he wants what is best for his son.
Phuong Ly is the protagonist of “Fatherland.” Named after her father’s eldest daughter with his previous wife, Phuong has lived her life in her half-sister Vivien’s shadow. Phuong views herself as deficient in every way compared with Vivien, and because of this, she harbors a mix of envy of and longing for her. Phuong majored in biology in college, but her degree is going to waste; she works in a restaurant that caters to foreign tourists. She wears an ao dai to appeal to the tourists’ gaze, always the subject of their photographs but never able to view herself because though they often promise to, the tourists never send her copies. Phuong longs to break the mold of her life, to live as Vivien does.
When Vivien visits her family in Vietnam, Phuong is forced to confront the latent jealousy that has haunted her life and her aspirations. She discovers, through Vivien, that Mr. Ly named his second set of children after his first to bait his elder children into visiting him. To Phuong, this means that she is not just a substitute for Vivien, but her father loves Vivian more. Phuong loses all respect for Vivien when her older sister reveals that the former Mrs. Ly has been lying in her letters. Vivien is not a doctor, but an unemployed woman looking to impress her Vietnamese family and live up to the fake life story her mother made up for her. While this shatters any hopes Phuong had about Vivien helping her immigrate to America, it strengthens her resolve to leave Vietnam and seek the kind of success she had previously envied Vivien for achieving.
Vivien is Phuong’s elder half-sister. Vivien never wrote to her father and his new family, but Vivien’s mother would write infrequent letters, updating them about Vivian and her siblings’ lives. According to those letters, Vivien is a successful pediatrician and a cosmopolitan woman who has traveled the world and is capable of anything she puts her mind to. When she visits her family in Vietnam, this image is upheld by her extravagant spending and her comfort in urbane activities. However, she appears to Phuong more foreign than Vietnamese due to her inability to handle the heat and humidity.
Vivian attempts to bond with her sister by giving her a set of lingerie. She wants Phuong to be able to live the type of liberated life a woman living in the United States can enjoy. Phuong’s opinion of Vivien is inverted when she discovers that her sister is a fraud: the life story that she has been told through Vivien’s mother’s letters is a lie. The former Mrs. Ly and her family live much less extravagant lives than her letters let on. Vivian was a receptionist, not a doctor. She recently lost her job and used her severance pay to fund her trip to Vietnam. She breaks down when she confesses to her sister. Vivien leaves Vietnam unable to help sponsor Phuong’s immigration to the United States and is no longer a role model to Phuong, but a catalyst for taking action to change her life. Vivien and her mother also represent the fraught expectations placed on refugees and immigrants by their families that they leave behind.
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Aging
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Asian American & Pacific Islander...
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Family
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Immigrants & Refugees
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Sexual Harassment & Violence
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The Best of "Best Book" Lists
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Vietnamese Studies
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Vietnam War
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War
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