Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on March 21, 2023

Wandering Souls is the story of a refugee family. It begins with a physical journey from Vietnam to England and ends as a life journey brings a refugee into late middle age.

Thi Ahn is one of the Vietnamese boat people who made it to Hong Kong. Her father’s plan was to divide the family, sending Ahn and her brothers Thanh and Minh first, followed by her parents, her two younger sisters, a baby brother and her brother Dao. Ahn’s boat arrives in Hong Kong after a brief encounter with Thai pirates who traffic in women. Her other family members drown when the boat that ferries them capsizes. Ahn learns their fate a few weeks after her arrival in Hong Kong when she is asked to identify their bodies. At sixteen, she becomes the guardian of her younger brothers.

While the story is primarily told from Ahn’s perspective, Dao occasionally chimes in with his concerns about Ahn and his other living siblings. Whether dead people should voice their thoughts as characters in a novel is, I suppose, a question of taste. I’m not a fan. I want dead people to keep their opinions to themselves, particularly their opinions of me which, I must assume, are unlikely to be favorable. Turning ghosts into characters makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s a personal problem, as chatty spirits are a common literary device.

My literary preferences notwithstanding, it makes sense in the context of the novel that Dao would comment from the afterlife on the observations he makes of his siblings. Dao is one of the wandering souls that give the book its title. I’m not sure it makes sense that his commentary would so often take the form of poetry, but who knows how ghosts communicate?

Dao's appearances contrast with American veterans of the Vietnam War who enter the story to express their remorse for setting up sound systems to disturb the souls of dead Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnamese cultural traditions/ superstitions teach that souls of the dead are condemned to wander until they have been buried in native soil. Disturbing their souls is meant as a form of psychological warfare. Dao is presumably wandering because his body washed up in Hong Kong, far from his homeland.

The understated story is largely free of drama, apart from the tragedy that turns Ahn and her brothers into orphaned refugees. Cecile Pin conveys Ahn’s fears but gives little attention to the atmosphere in the refugee camps in Hong Kong and England. Ahn has an uncle in New Haven but, not wanting to be around living relatives when much of her immediate family is dead, Ahn doesn’t mention him to the resettlement specialist. The US denies the family’s refugee application (likely because Ahn failed to mention her uncle) but England accepts them.

The story makes the point that each decision in a life opens a new timeline and forecloses others. Would the family have had a better life in America? The answer is unknowable. If her father had not sent the family to Hong Kong, would they all have survived in Vietnam? When Ahn flirts with guilt for abandoning her country, she is reminded that her family might have been sent to a forced labor camp if they had stayed. Each choice in a life opens a new door and closes countless others, but we never know what we would have discovered behind the doors we close.

Ahn’s siblings study English and, when Ahn turns eighteen, are granted Council housing in London. Ahn lives a life of sacrifice, taking a sewing job while her brothers attend school. One brother drops out at sixteen and begins to live a life that might be a bit shady. The other eventually makes a life of his own, although not the life he wants. Some choices are a function of opportunity and the opportunities we may desire are not always available.

Most of the story’s focus is on Ahn, whose life is narrated from the third-person. Ahn feels she has failed to raise her brothers properly, tarnishing her father’s dream that the boys would become doctors or scientists in America. Apart from letting us know what Ahn is thinking, Pin does little to give the reader a sense of the struggle that she endures. Or perhaps she isn’t struggling as she moves through the course of an average life (much of it lost to the reader in a flash forward), a life that begins in tragedy but becomes productive with the help of the Refugee Council.

The novel makes the case that helping refugees is essential. In a history lesson, we learn that Margaret Thatcher complained that giving council housing to the Vietnamese is unfair to white people. She thought Poles and Hungarians would assimilate more easily and feared that the Vietnamese would start riots. Thatcher carried on a British tradition of racism, a tradition that made British governments believe it was just fine to colonize and rule brown people around the world.

As the story nears its end, the perspective shifts to Ahn’s daughter Jane, who begins to narrate in the first person. Jane feels the weight of dead family members she never met, of human trafficking victims in Thailand of whom she has only read, of wandering souls in Vietnam during a war that ended before she was born. The reader assumes that Jane has likely been the narrator all along, a point of view that explains the sense of detachment from Ahn’s story.

The detachment is heightened by occasional pauses to teach history lessons: trafficking in Thailand, refugee statistics, Thatcher’s response to UN pressure to accept boat people into England. Pin adds academic discussions of the Iliad, transgenerational trauma, Joan Didion essays, and diverse cultural responses to death. Little of this resonates. The encounter with Thai pirates, for example, is so brief and uneventful that it creates no tension.

I sometimes had the impression that Pin was interested in showing off her breadth of knowledge, or perhaps in writing a novel that lit professors could use to illustrate various writing techniques, rather than telling an engaging story. The academic asides only enhance the feeling that we are glimpsing the story of a life that the narrator didn’t live. That narrative choice robs the story of the power it might otherwise have had.

Before the narrator’s final first-person intrusion into the story, the story wraps up with a brief return to the third-person point of view, perhaps a bit too predictably as the family contemplates their New Haven relatives and the need to give the wandering souls their rest. Trappings of a memoir round out the narrative.

Considered as a whole, Wandering Souls too often seems remote, depriving the reader of a strong connection to the characters or key events. The narrator’s detachment keeps the novel from being inspirational or truly moving, although — to be fair — not all difficult lives are inspirational or moving. At the same time, even an academic discussion of refugees in a time of crisis serves as an important reminder of lives less fortunate than those that most of us live. Simply calling attention to the boat people and the Vietnamese diaspora makes Wandering Souls worthwhile.

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