Ghosts In Gurba's Mean

In Gurba’s Mean, ghosts shape the narrative with the opening of Sophia’s story and the closing of the story with the relationship Sophia still has with Myriam. Myriam and Sophia’s story interlink together because they are both victims of rape, they both represent a form of death, and they both live through memories represented through the figurative image of the ghost. Myriam connects to Sophia in many ways: through guilt, assimilation, feelings, and stories. Sophia has become a statistic and her identity has been excluded and dismissed from society by the news as “the bludgeoning death of a transient in Oakley Park” (3). To Myriam, the inability of the news to name Sophia is unfair, she states, “This description is cruel. It reduces her to

In Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Moon is empowered by her victimization to seek revenge and she ends up killing the two white boys who tormented her on the beach. She haunts them like the figure of the ghost until she finds them. Moon also faces the same vulnerability that Myriam and the narrator in Nguyen’s “Black-eyed women” face after their traumas but Moon immediately makes a decision of revenge, the narrator states, “If she were to die today, she would come back to earth as an angry ghost to haunt those motherfuckers” (15). Here the figure of the ghost does not represent repressed memories, instead, it represents a form of action. Moon uses the ghost to seek her revenge and once she seeks her revenge she has no lingering memories from the night she was victimized or the night she killed her two assaulters. The narrator suggests that the figure of the ghost just serves as a warning to not bully anyone because people are complex beings who act through emotions, she states, “My intentions are to veer you away from teasing and humiliating little chubby Chinese girls like myself” (16-17). This suggests that the ghost story is representative of a moral lesson. Gurba and Nguyen, different from Chin, shape the identity of the ghost in a different way from Chin’s use of the ghost as a moral lesson about revenge. In Gurba’s novel and Nguyen’s novel, ghosts function as representations of memories and people’s attempt to repress them from their memories. Arguably, both novels argue that ghost create the identities of people especially when one tries to repress them from their lives. In Nguyen’s story “Black-eyed women”, the narrator repressed the memory of her brother for twenty-five years but it was clear that she hasn’t been able to forget because she has suppressed herself from social interaction and refuses to believe in ghost despite the fact