The Refugees I Love You to Want Me Review
Mrs. Khanh and her husband, Professor Khanh, are at a wedding banquet. They had attended many others like information technology, unremarkably out of obligation. The professor had jotted down his approval and the name of the couple, whom they had never met. When the couple visited their tabular array, he called them by their correct names and bestowed proficient wishes upon them. But Mrs. Khanh can't assistance just remember of the dark of the professor's diagnosis, when he had wept for the commencement time in their iv decades of married life.
This short story shares some elements of the previous story. Similar Norma, Mrs. Khanh understands her husband'southward need for emotional and physical connectivity and back up, even if she feels more than isolated as a result of remaining with her married man. At this betoken, the professor's diagnosis is unnamed, and therefore readers focus on Mrs. Khanh's experience of heartbreak.
Mrs. Khanh tells the professor that the couple is honeymooning in Paris and the French Riviera. They reminisce near their ain honeymoon, twoscore years prior, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-three. Merely it is clear to her that the professor's memories are slipping away from him. When the band begins to play "I'd Love You to Want Me," he comments that they used to listen to it all the time before the children were born—but the song hadn't been released earlier her first pregnancy.
As the professor's diagnosis comes more and more into focus, Nguyen once once again associates the loss of memory with tragedy. The professor loses not merely his ability to experience the present fully, but his past also becomes erased. This too leads to Mrs. Khanh feeling more and more isolated: despite the fact that she still has a loving husband, he starts to forget their human relationship.
The professor tries to get upwardly to trip the light fantastic toe, saying "You always insisted we dance when you heard this song, Yen." Mrs. Khanh hides her surprise at being called past a proper noun that is not hers. She tells him to sit down down, and he obeys, wounded, not realizing that he is in no status to trip the light fantastic.
The first appearance of Yen is surprising, and Mrs. Khanh does not know how to correct her married man. This hints at her later resignation to existence called past this name, effectively making herself into a person she does not know.
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Equally they bulldoze back from the nuptials, the professor takes a wrong turn, driving to the community college from which he had recently retired instead of going home. After coming to America, he'd been unable to discover work in oceanography and settled for teaching Vietnamese. When he realizes his error, he asks Mrs. Khanh why she didn't tell him they were going the wrong mode. Mrs. Khanh had not been paying attention, worrying near who Yen might exist.
Even in the stories whose master disharmonize does not centre on the refugee experience per se, Nguyen notwithstanding manages to weave in details that elaborate on that experience: here, the professor could non find piece of work in his field afterwards coming to America, and thus had to settle for a different profession.
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The adjacent morning, Mrs. Khanh tells the professor about the previous night's events, as he had asked her to inform him of the moments when he no longer acted similar himself. His shoulders sag when he hears about his lunge for the dance flooring, knowing that he must accept looked ridiculous at his age, and in his status.
The professor starts to become a ghost of himself, as the memories that people have of him do not fully align with the memories of his own experiences. It is almost as though he becomes a stranger to himself every bit he hears what he did the previous dark.
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The professor and Mrs. Khanh's son Vinh arrives, fresh from his graveyard shift at the hospital. He has brought them a gift: a replica of a Picasso painting in an ornate frame that he bought in Saigon the previous month. He says that studies have shown that Picasso's paintings can help people similar the professor. Vinh goes on to say that he and his five siblings think that Mrs. Khanh should retire from the library so that she can take intendance of the professor. Mrs. Khanh argues that she'south not old enough for retirement.
Despite the fact that Mrs. Khanh understands her husband's need for support, it is difficult for her to give up both her independence and to isolate herself from the residue of the globe, particularly every bit her husband becomes less and less present through the story.
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When Vinh tells Mrs. Khanh to be reasonable, she can't assist only retrieve of him as an irresponsible teenager, sneaking out of the house at dark to be with his American girlfriend. When the professor had nailed his windows shut, Vinh had eloped before long after his loftier school graduation. He had shouted that he was in honey—and that she wouldn't know anything near that, because her marriage had been arranged. Still, Vinh's marriage had non lasted more than iii years.
Vinh becomes another example of characters rebelling confronting their cultural identity and family. Vinh, believing that his parents never truly loved each other because of their arranged matrimony, subsequently pursued love in defiance of his parents.
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Vinh continues to contend that Mrs. Khanh doesn't need the coin, but that the professor needs her at home. He points to his father's shirt, which is stained by hollandaise sauce. Mrs. Khanh cleans him up. Later, she takes the painting and is disturbed past the image of the woman with two optics on the side of her confront. She sets information technology facing a wall in the professor'due south library.
Mrs. Khanh's feelings of being disturbed past the painting echo her feelings about Yen. Both are women who the professor keeps bringing back into her life.
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Not long subsequently this visit, the professor and Mrs. Khanh terminate attending Lord's day mass and gradually see less and less of their friends. The only times she leaves the house are to go shopping or to get to the library, where she was ordering a sizeable collection of Vietnamese books and movies for the residents of nearby little Saigon. When her shift ends at noon, she always leaves with a sense of dread.
Like the ghostwriter in the starting time story, Mrs. Khanh and the professor slowly become versions of ghosts equally they remove themselves from the outside earth. However Mrs. Khanh still maintains a broader connectedness to her culture in trying to make sure that there are materials in the library for refugees like herself.
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At habitation, Mrs. Khanh continues to make the dwelling easier for the professor to navigate. She tapes out a path from the bed to the bathroom, and posts lists strategically around the firm reminding the professor to exercise certain tasks. The professor, in turn, hires a handyman to install iron bars on the windows.
The professor even isolates himself more fully past attempting to make it difficult for him to get out the firm. Afterward, they rely on each other more and more for the connexion they lack from the outside world.
Themes
For Mrs. Khan, the about disturbing problem is when the professor comes home equally a stranger. Ane day, he returns from an afternoon walk with a single red rose in a plastic tube, despite the fact that he was never romantic. When he presents it to her, she takes it reluctantly and asks him what her name is. He responds, "Yen, of class." Mrs. Khanh resists the urge to snap the rose in one-half.
Fifty-fifty more than the sense of isolation, Mrs. Khanh becomes frustrated by the fact that he seems to have a deeper or more than intimate connection with another woman than with her: he brings Yen a rose, which he has never done for Mrs. Khanh.
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That evening for dinner, Mrs. Khanh and the professor talk about the postcard they received from their eldest daughter, who works in Munich. The professor reminisces virtually his own travels. The professor so asks why Mrs. Khanh bought the rose on the table. She corrects him, telling him that he bought it. He is shocked and says he hopes information technology doesn't happen once more. Mrs. Khanh is angry, convinced that he had intended the rose for another adult female. As she carries the dishes and spectacles to the kitchen, the load becomes as well much and she drops them. She sighs and says she'll have care of it.
Mrs. Khanh is particularly disturbed past the professor's hope that he won't buy a rose over again. It is an intimate and romantic gesture, but she thinks that he believes she is not worthy of that gesture—and withal some other woman is indeed worthy of that gesture. These thoughts counterbalance on her so much that she has trouble doing her regular tasks, and additionally, her husband is unable to provide her with whatsoever back up himself.
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That evening, Mrs. Khanh goes to the professor'south library, which is filled with hundreds of books. He cultivated the drove later they were forced to leave his books behind when they fled Vietnam. She finds the notebooks where he's been tracking his mistakes over the past months, just at that place is no mention of Yen. Mrs. Khanh writes, under the most contempo entry, "Today I called my wife by the name of Yen."
Yen continues to haunt Mrs. Khanh, to the betoken where she feels she needs to deceive her married man (writing in his handwriting in his own notebook) in order to rid herself of the specter of who this person might be.
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Over the next few days and weeks, the professor calls Mrs. Khanh "Yen" again and again. Mrs. Khanh is consumed with curiosity nearly this woman. She records every incidence of this mistake in his notebook, but each day the same thing happens, to the point where she thinks she might flare-up into tears if she hears the name again.
Each time the professor calls Mrs. Khanh past the name of Yen, she continues to feel more and more erased. Her mindset reveals that she is nigh going crazy herself in trying to rid the professor'south heed of this woman.
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One day, Mrs. Khanh finds the professor in the bath, naked from the waist downward and furiously scrubbing his pants and underwear under hot water. When he sees her, he screams at her to go out. He has never lost control of himself in this style, not even when they'd been desperately poor in the first days later on arriving in California. She thinks that that had been true love—going to work every twenty-four hours and not complaining nearly the lives that they had lost.
Dissimilar the ghostwriter, who pushed abroad her memories, and the boy's family unit in "State of war Years," who simply moved past their memories in order to create a new life, Mrs. Khanh provides a different perspective. She sees their memories and their hardship every bit the times that brought them together.
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Nor had the professor yelled at Mrs. Khanh when they were lost at sea with their children, huddled together on a refugee boat and hoping for rescue. The professor had made up tales about how they were heading straight for the Philippines. When they finally did meet land, she had blurted out, "I beloved yous"—something she had never said in public and hardly ever in private.
As Mrs. Khanh explores her memory, she continues to see the value in what they take experienced: that their arduousness in being refugees has provided them with their virtually intimate moments. Perhaps this is the greatest tragedy of the professor'south condition—that their love is found merely in memory.
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The professor and Mrs. Khanh had never spoken of this incident at sea, even though he spoke of many events of which she had no recollection. Mrs. Khanh begins to worry that her own memory is unpleasing, but she fears even more that the professor is forgetting who she is. She turns off the telephone and then that the professor wouldn't respond the calls, afraid that if their children asked for her, he wouldn't know who she was.
Fifty-fifty though the professor is the 1 who is losing his memory, Mrs. Khanh as well fears her ain memories are slipping as he starts to replace experiences they shared with experiences that he might have had with other women—similar the holiday in Dalat he mentions later.
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Mrs. Khanh speaks to Vinh over the phone. She is more forthcoming with him about the professor's condition than with her other children, but she grows frustrated when he encourages her to quit her job at the library once more. When she hangs up, she changes the sheets that the professor had bed-wet the previous evening. Her body is sore and tight from doing chores and worrying, and she cannot sleep.
Mrs. Khanh'south state of affairs reveals a dichotomy: even though she is providing him with intimacy and back up, since he appears less and less like her married man, she feels more and more isolated in having to exist her husband'south sole caretaker.
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Months laissez passer. Mrs. Khanh follows the professor on his walks, discreetly staying at a distance of ten or twenty feet away. They read together, but the professor reads aloud, and very slowly, until i 24-hour interval he realizes that he's been trying to read a sentence for five minutes. He thinks that he is losing his listen. Later that incident, Mrs. Khanh reads to him, stopping whenever he begins to recite a memory from their one-time life, or the trip they had taken to Saigon 3 years prior.
Even though it is the professor who has started to become merely an echo of who he in one case was, Mrs. Khanh as well leans into this dynamic. In her obsession with making certain that her husband is okay, she literally becomes his shadow: trailing him, and becoming his voice when they read together.
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The professor starts to talk about how, when he and Mrs. Khanh had visited their dwelling in Vietnam, a night masseur biked past, and they had heard the clink of a glass bottle filled with pebbles announcing his line of work. He recounts that she had called it the loneliest sound in the world—but she doesn't think saying that. He talks nearly how they enjoyed ice cream in Dalat, but he had gone to Dalat merely in one case, without her. Equally he continues to talk about the water ice foam, he calls her Yen again.
As the professor recounts more and more than memories that she does non share, Mrs. Khanh feels more than and more than isolated from him—as if they exercise not accept a common past, even though they have been married for four decades now.
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Mrs. Khanh tells the professor that Yen is not her name—her proper noun is Sa. The professor is shocked and pulls out his notebook. That evening, when the professor has fallen asleep, she reads the notebook. He had written, "Matters worsening. Today she insisted I phone call her by another proper name. Must go along closer eye on her for she may not know who she is anymore." Mrs. Khanh shuts the book abruptly.
Reading this is especially disturbing to Mrs. Khanh because it starts to nag at her sense of reality and makes her question her ain identity and memories.
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The librarians throw Mrs. Khanh a cheerio party for her last day of piece of work and give her a box of travel guides for the vacations they knew she always wanted to take. When she returns home, she cannot find the professor. She drives her car around the block, then drives in wider and wider circles through the neighborhood. She shouts his name out the window, louder and louder.
Mrs. Khanh continues to reveal her devotion to her husband in giving upwardly her job, and in isolating herself from the rest of the world. It is ironic that the librarians give her travel books, as she knows that she will never be traveling with her husband while he is still live.
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Mrs. Khanh returns home subsequently dark. She smells gas; a kettle is on the stove but the burner hasn't been lit. She turns it off and sees lite spilling from the professor's library. He is shelving the travel guides that the other librarians gave her. When he sees her, he cries out, "Who are you?" She responds, "It's just me," she said. "It's Yen." He calms downwards and sits in his armchair. Mrs. Khanh pulls out a short story collection that the professor had given her and which she had never read, and begins to read aloud. She realizes she may non know much about dearest, only she knows what she would do for her husband until the very end.
Mrs. Khanh'southward concluding acceptance of the name Yen demonstrates her level of cede: she is willing to brand herself into a ghost in order to allow her husband to maintain his sanity. As he loses his memories, so likewise must she relinquish the retentivity of who she was and who they had been together in guild to foreclose him from feeling like he is losing his mind—and to give her some sense of connexion to a husband she is losing.
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