The “Black-Eyed Women” The short story “Black-Eyed Women” is within the book The Refugees, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen. The characters throughout the short story share similar qualities as the undead. This being said, the 38-year-old Vietnamese refugee is the narrator of the short story who works as a ghostwriter; who has lived in silence with her mother for a good amount of time. The idea of a ghost’s embodiment is proven through the ultimate struggle one may face during catastrophic periods. But what do ghosts have to do with refugees? Viet Than Nguyen explains this through his writing when the narrator’s brothers ghost visited her and said, “You died too”. “You just don’t know it” (Nguyen 17). This brings attention to the obligation the ‘black-eyed women’ present as an embodiment of ghosts, and how the narrator interprets such thing. The refugees may have died internally during the process of finding asylum, but have proven otherwise that they are still living externally. The importance Viet Thanh Nguyen brought into context of the ghost was to feel a sense of understanding of what one faces as a refugee. Refugees are people who have been forced to flee their home, their country for the fear of persecution. Such as the narrator, and her family. The narrator remembers the day like yesterday when traveling the sea by boat when, “my brother took me into the cramped engine room…used his pocketknife to slash my long hair into the short jagged boy’s cut I still wore” (Nguyen