Summary of the Black-Eyed Women Written by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Article by Ryker J. Phoenix
"Black-Eyed Women" is a short story written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. The story is a haunting exploration of the lasting effects of trauma and the power of stories to shape our lives.
The protagonist of the story is a Vietnamese-American woman who works as a ghostwriter, helping others to tell their stories. However, she herself has never told her own story, haunted as she is by the memories of her past. She is a survivor of a boat accident that claimed the lives of her mother and brother when she was a young girl. In the aftermath of the accident, she found herself haunted by their ghosts, who she believed were following her everywhere she went.
The story is structured around a series of encounters that the protagonist has with various people in her life, each of whom reminds her of her past and forces her to confront her own trauma. Through these encounters, we see how the protagonist has been shaped by her experiences, both as a survivor of the accident and as an immigrant to the United States.
One particularly powerful encounter is with a man who is writing a book about the boat people – the refugees who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. The protagonist agrees to help him with his research, but is horrified to discover that he is more interested in the sensational aspects of the story than in the human beings who lived through it. He asks her questions about the violence and horror that she herself experienced, but seems completely uninterested in her personal experience or the emotional toll that it took on her. In this encounter, we see how the protagonist's trauma has been objectified and commodified by others, reducing her to a mere object of curiosity rather than a human being with her own story to tell.
Throughout the story, Nguyen explores the power of storytelling to shape our lives and our understanding of the world around us. The protagonist is haunted by the ghosts of her past, but also by the stories that she has heard and told throughout her life. She is a ghostwriter who has never told her own story, and in doing so has allowed others to define her and her experiences. It is only through confronting her own trauma and telling her own story that she is able to break free from the ghosts of her past and reclaim her own agency.
"Black-Eyed Women" is a powerful and haunting exploration of trauma, memory, and the power of storytelling. Through the story of one woman's struggle to confront her past and find her own voice, Nguyen offers a profound meditation on the human condition and the ways that we are shaped by the stories that we tell ourselves and others. It is a story that will stay with readers long after they have finished reading it, a testament to the enduring power of literature to move and inspire us.
Read the story here.
