Theme of Orphanhood in Literature Essay Example

The most common idea of family is usually a group of blood-related people who confide in each other for security and reassurance. However, some people do not obtain the underappreciated privilege of having a family, which forces them to create their own. Within the novel We Should Never Meet, author Aimee Phan exemplifies the struggles of living as an orphan in the United States within her two short stories, “Vistors” and “We Should Never Meet”. With Kim belonging to “We Should Never Meet” and Vinh belonging to “Visitors”, both protagonists struggle to create new relationships outside of their inner circle due to the relentless amount of loyalty and dedication they have for their community. Their community, named apartment 354, understand what it is like to be self-supporting and has grown to become hostile to anyone else who is not an orphan like them. The self-created family has provided each other with a place to stay and a sense of comfortability like any other family would. However, once both protagonists realize that their new relationships are created solely out of sympathy, they lash out in a rage that results in criminal activities to satisfy their self-destructive lifestyle, which pulls the group further away from this picture-perfect idea of the previously mentioned mainstream family.

 Trauma plays an enormous role in the growth of an orphan that, over time, their traumatic past almost seems to become a character trait. Because of the traumatic instances that occur in the young ages of being an orphan, there is a great deal of empathy that others feel towards them. In the short story “We Should Never Meet”, the purpose of the dialogue between Kim and the woman in the store is shown to display the robbery that Kim had made an attempt to succeed in. After being caught by the woman in the store she exclaims, “Leave, the woman said. There was a sternness in the woman’s face, but also compassion--something new” (Phan 31). Instead of becoming angry, the woman was more worried about the motive that drove Kim to rob her. The compassionate expression that the woman had shown Kim was something she was not used to; someone treating her with sympathetic pity. She was used to aggression and disrespect that she would have received after a robbery similar to this one.  

Meanwhile, Vihn didn’t have to steal from anyone to reveal that he was hurting from his traumatic past. In the short story “Visitors”, after a striking conversation that Vihn had with a man named Bac Nguyen, it left the older man to become thoughtfully reflective and assumed that Vihn had been through trauma, “Only with time, experience, and loss could a person realize that there isn’t simply one bad guy or one good guy--that in war, there are many sides at fault” (Phan 96). The diction, “time, experience, and loss…”(Phan) is an accurate assumption that Vihn had gone alone throughout his life without the protection of his metaphorical army, in which this case is his biological parents, had caused Vihn to have an anger-filled personality. While Bac Nguyen compares the life of Vihn to a metaphorical war, it simultaneously raises his empathetic feelings towards him because of the assumed trauma. Although pity isn't what Kim’s or Vihn's intentions were during their encounters with these outside relationships, their demeanors spoke entirely for them both rather than what they were doing or saying.