Summary Of Sister By Lam

In “Sister”, Lam depicts a character of a woman named Eevie who is experiencing and dealing with post-traumatic disorder caused by his bitter memories surviving in her escape from the Civil War erupting in Vietnam. She has experienced flashback, nightmare, feeling of anxiety, and physical pain whenever she is trying to deal with her trauma that is closely-related to her home country. She has met with her psychologist and told him that “he’s leaving me. He’s going to some place I don’t know”(123). All this time, she feels worry if her brother, Little Demon leave her behind as his brother is going to ‘place’ which refers to revisiting past memories. Little Demon seems to start revisiting his childhood memories of the Civil War regardless of him suffering so much to survive from the tragic event. Towards the beginning of the story, he has called her sister and informed her “in the little boy’s voice he uses when he’s very excited” that he “just called home” (112,113). He is very excited to know that
She says to her psychologist:“ I can’t deal with that”. She cannot deal with her past experience like Little Demon does. Due to her having post-traumatic disorder, she keeps feels worried and scared whenever Little Demon and Mrs. Littman remind her of her origin. It take out all her strength to care about her past because she know that her past memories are all about ‘the father died in battle, and the mother drowned at sea” and “ a weepy child whose life depended solely on her willpower”(117). She also has a hard time to sleep at night and experience physical pain after her brother calls her and bring along the memories with him. Whenever she has those memories in mind, she always doubt herself whether to let it go or not. Hence, Eevie cannot go to the ‘place’ as to go there means to experience the bitter moment once