Sometimes, it seems as though not a day goes by without newspapers publishing reports on the plight of refugees from all parts of the world. Millions set out on overcrowded boats and vehicles fleeing conflict, persecution, and instability in their homelands. Tragically, many lose their lives in the process. The survivors often encounter hostile government policies.
Migration is not a recent phenomenon, of course. Ariel Dorfman has pointed out that humans have been telling themselves two stories about such journeys for ages. “One is about the curse of wandering, the loss of Paradise when expelled from one’s birthplace.” The second is about how, to create anything new, “we must break away from our suffocating places of origin and set out on a journey into the unknown”.
Writers who have themselves been displaced often navigate between these two poles. As Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen has written: “I cultivate that feeling of what it was to be a refugee, because a writer is supposed to go where it hurts, and because a writer needs to know…only through such acts of memory, imagination, and empathy can we grow our capacity to feel for others”.
Wandering Souls, the debut novel of Cecile Pin, is one such act of memory, imagination and empathy. The London-based Pin, of Vietnamese and French heritage, has said that the novel is partly based on the story of her mother, who lost her parents and five siblings while immigrating to France. Wandering Souls, then, “is the culmination of years of me trying to find out more about my identity and family history, and my role in it”.
The book deals with the fortunes of a group of so-called Vietnamese boat people who fled their country in the wake of the Vietnam War. The first line is immediately arresting and sets the tone for what is to come: “There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies – everything in between is speculation.”
The linchpin of the novel is Anh, a teenage girl who, at the start, is informed that she and two younger brothers will be leaving her home in a town near Ho Chi Minh City to embark on a risky boat ride to Hong Kong. They will have to spend some weeks in a refugee camp there, waiting for her parents and other siblings to join them. After that, her father says encouragingly, “we’ll leave for America and meet Uncle Nam in New Haven”.
It doesn’t occur to Anh at the time that “this breaking in half was the first sign of peril, the first clue that her father knew one of the halves might fall”. Soon enough, we’re told that the rest of Anh’s family has perished on their journey, leaving her with the responsibility of caring for her surviving brothers. She is now their North Star, Anh thinks, “the most solid presence in their lives, and so of course she had to be fine, and she wanted them to assume that she was, too”.
Wandering Souls moves swiftly but not superficially over the years that follow. Having no choice, Anh and her brothers adapt to life in the Hong Kong refugee camp and are finally accepted for resettlement in the United Kingdom. Once they arrive at their final destination, they have to get on with the business of reinventing their lives.
The process involves finding ways to earn a living, assimilate, and forge new relationships. The hazards on this second journey include experiencing their first snowfall, facing casual racism, and, above all, dealing with ghosts of the past. As Zadie Smith wrote about immigrants in White Teeth: “They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.”
All of this is not presented as a simple linear narrative. Wandering Souls is artfully constructed, with sections from the viewpoint of the meandering spirit of a younger brother who had drowned on the initial crossing. There is a point to these passages, as we will discover, and they are often couched as poetic fragments that are sometimes heartfelt and sometimes fretful.
Yet other sections bring to light shady tactics of American soldiers during the Vietnam War as well as the reception of refugees in their adopted lands. Notably, another presiding spirit is introduced later, who turns out to be the reason for the book’s narration.
Among other things, this narrator dwells on the manifestations of grief and how it is diagnosed and handled across cultures. The tone here is pained and investigative, but can also be mordant: “Knowledge allows remembering and remembering is honouring. I want all the dead to be revered. I want monuments and statues and poems in their honour. I want podcasts and a ten-part docuseries, I want our own Apocalypse Now.”
With dignity and grace, the novel follows the journey of these wandering souls until they achieve a form of reconciliation with the past. In doing so, it extends Joan Didion’s dictum of telling ourselves stories in order to live by adding: “We tell ourselves stories in order to heal.”
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