White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway

White Ghost Girls is a novel about two American sisters, Frankie and Kate, growing up in Hong Kong during the late 1960s. During this time period, Hong Kong was not Communist, but neighboring China was, under the control of Mao Zedong. The war is raging in the nearby jungles of Vietnam, and in the book the girls’ father is an American photographer for Time Magazine. The two girls and their mother live in Hong Kong while their father is off photographing the war. The novel examines the relationship of sisterhood, the loss of innocence, the effects of war and of neglect, and the raging desire of a person to be loved. All people have this need for love, and some will do absolutely anything to get people to notice them, but this ultimately leads to their own suffering.

At the beginning of the book, Kate and Frankie’s father is away and they are out on a boat with their mother and some of the family’s Chinese servants. The girls are playing in the water when they see a dark mass floating up from the depths. They see it is a body, covered in seaweed with fish biting at its flesh, and later learn it is one of many bodies that are washing out to see after being killed by Communist demonstrations near the Pearl River. Though the girls’ mother tries to keep them away from the events of the war, Kate says that seeing the dead body that day “marks the end of our innocence, exposes the impossibility of her efforts to protect us” (Greenway 10). But the girls’ mother tries nonetheless. She hides newspapers talking about the war from them, takes then to church, makes them get dressed up every Sunday, and ultimately tries to form them into the proper and refined women she desperately wishes they would be. Frankie takes this to mean that her mother does not love her enough to let be herself, and vilifies her mother for it. She constantly resists all of what her mother wants her to do. She throws herself at every man she sees, wears provocative clothing and disobeys all the time.

When she and Kate accompany the family’s servant, Ah Bing, to the market one day, she again tries to be reckless and disobedient. When they get to the market there is a Communist demonstration, and chaos erupts when the police arrive. Frankie convinces Kate to slip away from Ah Bing and the girls go into an alley where two large men confront them. The men take Frankie into a butcher shop and give Kate a bag of what they tell her is fruit but is actually a bomb. They make her put it into the middle of the police line, and the bomb explodes, killing several people. While Kate is away, the men abuse Frankie, and after this, she becomes even more unstable. Here the sisters’ relationship with each other also declines. They begin keeping secrets from each other, and Kate is forever burdened with her secret of what she did in the market. She is also burdened by her sister’s constant need for attention, for an outward show of love. About herself, Kate says, “I’m just supposed to be Katenick, muimui, little sister, follower, sidekick” (Greenway 95 ). Kate is Frankie’s shoulder to lean on, her constant support throughout all their schemes. In Frankie’s pursuit of affection, she overshadows Kate, or just drags her along, and Kate can never be recognized as her own person.

Another turning point in the story is when the girls’ parents decide to send Frankie away to boarding school. Their mother says she cannot control her anymore, and wants to send her to a place that will change her into a young lady. At this Frankie becomes more desperate than ever to be noticed, to be shown love. She smokes more, disobeys more, and seduces a boy at a pool party the family attends. She also flirts openly with her father’s friends. All this time their father is oblivious to what she is doing and why. He thinks only of the war and is obsessed with the fighting and adventure he finds in Vietnam. The situation escalates higher and higher until the day before she is to leave for boarding school, Frankie makes one last desperate attempt for love. The result absolutely blows the family to pieces, and they must confront the story of Frankie and the part that they each played in the tragedy of her life.

1. Do you think that Frankie did the diobedient, reckless things she did to break out of her mothers expectations, to get people to notice her, or both?

2. In the book the girls' father is so drawn to the war that he thinks of nothing else and is blind to the problems in his own family. Why do you think war mesmerizes people like this?