Ghosts have come to be seen in popular culture as universal symbols of the horror genre. The iconic image of two black holes in the middle of a floating white sheet is produced and reproduced in countless horror films, books and video games. In the novels, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen, however, ghosts are utilized to a much different effect. In the chapter, “No Name Woman” in The Woman Warrior, the speaker’s mother tells her the story of her aunt who committed suicide after being ostracized from the village for committing adultery. Filled with references to the constricting gender roles of traditional Chinese society, the story is meant to serve as a cautionary tale to the speaker. The speaker, however, chooses to imagine the story from her aunt’s perspective and breaks the cycle of silence that has shunned her aunt to a ghostly existence. “Black-Eyed Women” in The Refugees explores the relationship between a ghostwriter and her brother, who died during the Vietnam War. He appears to her and her mother as a ghost, helping the speaker confront her violent memories and realize her purpose as a writer. In both of these stories, rather than positioning ghosts as scary specters who have come to enact terrifying scenarios upon the characters, authors Kingston and Nguyen use ghosts as an extension of family heritage and characters’ histories. The presence of ghosts in their stories paradoxically illuminates the absence found in characters’ lives and, in the process, often helps these characters come to terms with certain aspects of their identities. In “No Name Woman” and “Black-Eyed Woman,” Kingston and Nguyen’s ghosts — defined by both their presence and the absences they leave — function to help reconcile conflicting feelings of heritage, trauma and identity. 

     In “No Name Woman,” Kingston establishes the construction of the ghost in her story as catalyzed, not by literal death, but rather by silencing and deliberate erasure. After being subjugated to immense violence by her fellow villagers and family members, the aunt gives birth to her child, who “would not soften her life but only trail after her, ghostlike, begging her to give it purpose” (Kingston 24). Born out of adultery, the child is tainted by the villagers’ perception of the mother’s sin and, therefore, going to succumb to the same pressures that had befallen their mother. Furthermore, the child is described as “ghostlike” right out of the womb. Kingston’s sharp juxtaposition of the life-giving quality of birth with the baby’s “ghostlike” appearance, something associated with death, emphasizes the construction of ghostliness. The aunt’s banishment from the village is the catalyst for her ghostliness; it is her symbolic death, rather than her literal suicide, that transmits the same categorization of ghost onto her doomed child. In the beginning of the story, the speaker’s mother warns her to “not tell anyone” about her aunt, explaining that they always say the speaker’s father has “all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (Kingston 8). These opening lines of “No Name Woman” serve to emphasize the constructed erasure of the aunt from the family’s history. The family’s intentional silencing of her story cements her ghostliness, for she is only ever mentioned in hushed conversations, left to the margins of existence. In noting that the speaker’s father has “all brothers,” Kingston also questions those who are more likely to become ghosts in their own lives. The strict gender hierarchy in a patriarchal society creates the conditions under which women are the ones unable to speak their stories and are left to become mere ghosts. 

Kingston’s intersecting ideas of silence and ghostliness come to fruition with the speaker’s choice to break her family-imposed cycle of silence at the end of “No Name Woman.” Throughout the story, the speaker struggles to reconcile her Chinese heritage with her search for identity in America. The talk-stories she is told by her mother are her only connection to her heritage, but even she is unsure of the realities and fictions of those stories. However, after reimagining the differing possible threads of the story from her aunt’s perspective and devoting “pages of paper to her,” she discovers the medium with which to interact with and express her heritage as she feels her “aunt [haunt her] -- her ghost drawn to [her]” (Kingston 25). Following years of conforming to her family’s policy of silence, the speaker finally begins to write about her aunt, giving a voice to someone who had previously been forgotten. Despite the negative connotations of “haunt,” often associated with malice or a desire to terrify, Kingston’s description of the speaker’s aunt haunting her is more pointing to the aunt’s ability to reciprocate communication in her newfound place in the world. No longer forgotten, the ghost of the aunt now interacts with the speaker through stories of heritage and memory. Kingston’s use of the ghost in “No Name Woman” highlights the function of ghosts as a continuation of a family mythology. Through storytelling, ghosts emerge as instruments of a collective memory. 

     Similarly, in “Black-Eyed Women,” ghosts define and construct the world of the living, as they illuminate many absences found in characters’ lives. The speaker in “Black-Eyed Women” is a ghostwriter; in the beginning of the story, she is commissioned to write a memoir for Victor Devoto, the sole survivor of an airplane crash. After being visited by her brother, the speaker asks Victor if he believes in ghosts, to which he responds that he often sees the ghosts of his dead family members “in [his] peripheral vision. They move fast and disappear before [he] can focus on them” (Nguyen 17). Unable to move past his survivor’s guilt, Victor relies on visits from the ghosts of his past in order to cope with his trauma. The “peripheral” quality of the ghosts emphasizes the actual absence left by their deaths, for Victor can never fully see them long enough to have meaningful interactions with them. Despite their presence as an extension of Victor’s memories, they will never be able to truly replace those he lost. Similar to Victor, the speaker’s life is defined by the violences of her past and those she lost. When she reflects on her childhood, she realizes that she had “passed [her] youth in a haunted country” (Nguyen 5). Growing up in Vietnam surrounded by colonialist conflicts, the speaker’s youth is “haunted” by not only those who lost their lives, but also by the lives she could have lived had she not grown up in a war-torn country. The long-term effects of colonialism and war are often seen as peripheral to the immediate violence of war and the androcentric retellings of war when, in fact, they should be recognized as war stories of immense consequence and violence (“On True War Stories,” Nguyen 145). 

     War stories can also be recognized as ghost stories — stories defined by trauma and loss of the lives one could have had. It is only when the ghostwriter is visited by her brother’s ghost that she is able to confront the haunted past she had suppressed for so long. Her body clenched “without shame and without fear… [she] wept for him… for all the years [they] could have had together but didn’t… [she] cried for those other girls who had vanished and never came back, including [herself]” (Nguyen 18). The speaker thinks of herself as a ghost. Not in the literal sense, given that she survived the war and immigrated to America with her mother, but symbolically; the trauma she suffered during the wartime had resulted in the loss of a piece of herself. She includes herself in the list of girls who had “vanished and never came back,” connecting “vanish” back to both Kingston and Nguyen’s links of erasure with ghostliness. The visit from her brother’s ghost prompts her to finally confront her memories of the Vietnam War, where her brother was cruelly murdered and she was sexually assaulted. Despite the horrifying traumas of these memories, she is able to process them “without shame and without fear” with the help of her brother’s ghost. Through this development, Nguyen asserts that the presence of ghosts in people’s lives are a result of unfinished business on behalf of the living rather than the ghosts themselves. 

     The end of “Black-Eyed Women” sees Nguyen interrogating and deconstructing the very notion of ghosts as solely beings who have passed away and are haunting the living. The ghostwriter decides to write her own collection of ghost stories to tell the stories of those forgotten; she goes “hunting for the ghosts… As they haunt our country, so do we haunt theirs” (Nguyen 21). By attributing “haunting” as something both ghosts and the living do to one another, Nguyen establishes the fluidity and reciprocity of ghostliness. Ghosts are not only those who have died; they can also be reflections and constructions of those still living. Kingston echoes this sentiment in “No Name Woman,” in which the speaker never knew her aunt when she was living; it was only through the interactions with her ghost, many of which were constructed fictions from the speaker’s imagination, that the speaker was able to parse through her conflicting feelings of heritage and identity. As both characters mature and grow, they shed the ghosts of who they used to be. Those ghosts do not disappear or cease to exist; they remain as reminders of their past and memories of their own histories.