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Refugees, Ghosts and a Story About Stories

In Cecile Pin’s debut novel, “Wandering Souls,” the tale of three young Vietnamese migrants transforms into a larger meditation about how and why refugee stories are told.

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By Eric Nguyen

• March 19, 2023
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WANDERING SOULS , by Cecile Pin

There’s a Vietnamese superstition: If you die away from home, your soul will become restless and won’t leave for the afterlife. Instead, you will be cursed to roam the earth as a ghost, hungry and cold, left without the closure to move on. This folk belief is the starting point of Cecile Pin’s debut novel, “Wandering Souls.”

In 1978, three years after the fall of Saigon, a Vietnamese teenager, Anh, packs for an escape from Vietnam with two of her six younger siblings. The plan: Sail by boat to Hong Kong, where the three will wait for the rest of their family, and once reunited, they’ll all relocate to the United States. Anh and her brothers Minh and Thanh successfully land in Hong Kong, but the wait for the rest of their family stretches longer than expected.

Eventually, bodies are found on the beach of a refugee camp. Among them is the rest of their family, who are buried on foreign ground. From then on, the three siblings are one another’s only family, a bond that is tested once they relocate to Britain, where they must not only survive but thrive because “if the three of them did not achieve success here, their family’s demise had no meaning, no overarching resolution.”

“Wandering Souls” begins very much like other novels about refugees. At its center are loss and the difficulties of starting over, the drudgery of survival and the necessity of assimilation. Pin is observant of how immigration shuffles families. Left without their parents, Anh becomes the de facto mother of the household. At 16, she sacrifices her education to work as a seamstress so her brothers can go to school and, she hopes, become prosperous. “She thought their success might make her own sacrifices worthwhile,” Pin writes, “that it would give deeper meaning to the labor she’d done to provide for them over the years.”

But who is Anh beyond her surrogate motherhood? Unfortunately, Pin gives us little opportunity to find out. We see Anh making her siblings’ favorite dishes and we’re with her as she stays up late worrying over the whereabouts of Minh, her delinquent teenage brother, but we know very little about her desires and the dreams she has for herself.

Yet “Wandering Souls” is more than a story of sacrifice and familial duty. The author has greater ambitions, first signaled in the intricate story structure she builds. Slowly, the novel takes wayward paths into the lives of the family’s lingering ghosts who invisibly observe the three siblings, and Pin mixes in fictionalized documents (like a newspaper article revealing Margaret Thatcher’s xenophobic attitudes toward Vietnamese refugees) that showcase the very real conservative politics of the 1980s. And most surprisingly, as the story unfolds, the voice of a new narrator begins to creep in, one that pulls from the philosophy of Martha Nussbaum, the “Iliad” and Joan Didion. Soon it becomes apparent the voice belongs to a writer, one preoccupied with loss: what it looks like, the grief it creates and the meaning — however tenuous — we give it. This narrator shares a telling quote by Didion: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.”

What emerges is something special — a polyvocal novel, an essay on inherited trauma and a quiet metafiction about telling stories we don’t own. At times, it’s unclear exactly where Pin is going — for instance, there’s a superfluous thread about American soldiers serving in Vietnam — but we follow because Pin’s novel is less about the story and more about how the story is made . Reading it is like watching a writer at work as she tries to give loss a plot and make meaning out of details. This proves to be more fascinating than the story of three siblings acclimating to their new home.

“Wandering Souls” asks: How should we tell refugee stories? Why should we tell them? And to whom? And, most important, what should we do with refugee stories, especially when years have passed and those who lived them are gone?

Eric Nguyen is the author of “Things We Lost to the Water.”

WANDERING SOULS | By Cecile Pin | 226 pp. | Henry Holt & Company | $26.99

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Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin review – Vietnamese refugees adrift in Thatcher’s Britain

This dazzling debut follows a traumatised family as they try to rebuild their lives in Britain

T he refugees fleeing the turmoil at the end of the Vietnam war became known as “boat people”. Cecile Pin ’s evocative debut, longlisted for the Women’s prize, was inspired by her mother’s experiences while emigrating to France, but she relocates her story to Thatcher’s Britain.

Fifteen-year-old Anh and her younger brothers, Thanh and Minh, are the first of their family to attempt the hazardous journey to Hong Kong. If they didn’t drown, they could be attacked by pirates. Their parents and younger siblings perish at sea. Detained in a camp, Anh swiftly recognises her vulnerability: “she was homeless and smelling and weak. A carrier of disease… perceived as vermin.” The three siblings remain in limbo until the UK agrees to accept them.

On arrival in Hampshire, they are taken to Sopley, a former Royal Air Force base, surrounded by barbed wire. Anh cares for her brothers until they are rehoused on a council estate in Catford, south London. She works as a seamstress while the boys continue their studies.

Threaded through this central narrative is the voice of their youngest brother, Dao (one of the titular wandering souls), meditations on grief and loss, and fragments of authorial research. Pin reminds us of the psychological warfare known as Operation Wandering Soul , used by the American military in Vietnam to intimidate the Viet Cong. Playing on the local belief that the unburied will never find peace, at night they would broadcast a tape meant to represent the cries of the dead.

One damning fact is particularly resonant. Thatcher pretended to welcome Vietnamese refugees, but Downing Street files released in 2009 reveal her reluctance to help 10,000 of them on racial grounds, believing white refugees would be easier to assimilate. Instead, she suggested to her Australian counterpart, Malcolm Fraser, that they buy an island to process and resettle the boat people.

Pin relates the hardship and trauma of her characters in unadorned, direct prose. This lean, affecting book packs a mighty punch and heralds a dazzling new talent.

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The haunted journey of Vietnam’s “wandering souls,” in an intricate novel of refugee flight

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Wandering Souls

By Cecile Pin Henry Holt: 240 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

In the Vietnamese culture, if someone doesn’t receive a proper burial in their hometown, “their souls are cursed to wander the earth aimlessly, as ghosts.” This is according to an American soldier, explaining the macabre tactic of playing tapes of loud voices during the Vietnam War to terrify the enemy.

In “ Wandering Souls ,” Cecile Pin’s subtle and gripping debut novel, such Americans are bit players, as are the ghosts of those who die fleeing the country. The wanderers in question are Anh, Minh and Thanh, three young orphans who travel overseas, from one refugee camp to another, before finally beginning to piece together a life.

Pin movingly explores how their lives are shaped — and warped — by larger historical forces, and then how these lost souls struggle to move through denial and into some tentative form of acceptance.

The narrative begins in 1978, three years after the last American helicopter fled Saigon; the communists are hunting among their own countrymen for traitors, causing a mass exodus, a story line with obvious echoes in recent events in Afghanistan .

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Straightforwardly written, the book seems almost deceptively simple at first, charting the departure of the three siblings — Anh is 16, Minh is 13 and Thanh is 10 — two weeks ahead of their parents and younger siblings, with the goal of getting to Hong Kong and eventually to a relative in the United States, where the promised land awaits.

But we view their departure with foreknowledge, which is far heavier than foreboding. The book’s devastating opening sentence reads, “There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies — everything in between is speculation.”

After tragedy wipes out everyone in that second boat, the book becomes more intricately layered. As Anh tries to parent her brothers while navigating life in the refugee camp, Pin widens her scope. In addition to the American soldiers seen during and after the war, she incorporates news articles recounting real historical events, including attacks by rural fisherman in Thailand who captured and raped female refugees, and, later, Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to limit refugees while putting on a friendly face for political reasons. (Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese “ boat people ” died trying to find safe harbor.)

There is also a literal wandering ghost: One of the family’s youngest siblings gives a first-person account from the limbo where their souls are stuck. The ghost chapters didn’t really work for me — for one thing, the voice is that of an adult and not a young child, and for another, I tend toward skepticism when the supernatural pokes into a narrative deeply grounded in realism. But as the book went on I realized it wasn’t really written for readers like me, but rather for those whose culture attunes them to the idea that death is a porous border.

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The novel is haunted and haunting, but it is not relentlessly grim. When the trio are finally preparing to leave Hong Kong for a new refugee camp in England, a Vietnamese man with a guitar plays Thanh a song in English symbolizing the hope that Pin threads throughout, with “lyrics Thanh could only partially understand, something about the sun coming.” He gives the boy a hurried education, playing snippets of “ Yesterday ” and “Hey Jude” before running back into his hut.

“He came back out with a piece of paper on which he had scribbled English words, some of which Thanh didn’t know the meaning of: ‘Pink Floyd’ and ‘Led Zeppelin’ and ‘ Fleetwood Mac .’” Here are the seeds of Thanh’s eventual assimilation. It will be easiest for him as the youngest and most gregarious, but Anh will take solace in his transformation, feeling that her years of sacrifice were worthwhile.

There is one more layer Pin adds midway through. A first-person narrator enters to put much of the book — the real history and the fictional characters — in perspective, offering a sense of how intergenerational trauma can gradually heal itself.

“The truth is, I don’t want to write about death,” the narrator says by way of introduction. “... I want family feasts and Sunday outings, school choirs and afternoon naps. But instead, I rip open wounds I never knew I had.… I find photos of the war, of children lying dead in front of their burning houses, their ghostly visions following me day and night.”

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The narrator says she can’t look away from all that she finds “not because I am drawn to the horrors but because I feel a visceral need to know them.

“Knowledge allows remembering and remembering is honoring,” she continues. “I want all the dead to be revered. I want monuments and statues and poems in their honor. I want podcasts and a ten-part docuseries. I want our own ‘Apocalypse Now.’”

Had Pin focused on the visceral horrors of the war itself, her first book might have caused people to turn away. But because she lets us live in the aftermath, we are inexorably pulled along, growing emotionally attached to Anh, Minh and Thanh, feeling an empathy and admiration for what these refugees endure, survive and achieve.

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Read Between the Spines

Wandering souls.

Having just read a book about the Vietnam War and its long-term impact on the Vietnamese who stayed, Wandering Souls provides a story of those who made the other choice – fleeing to escape reeducation camps and pursue a better life in another country as refugees.

Quick Synopsis

A haunting, gut-wrenching debut novel that paints a tender portrait of three Vietnamese child-refugees and their journey of hope, grief, and survival.

Publisher’s Synopsis

There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies―everything in between is speculation.

After the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Minh, and Thanh journey to Hong Kong with the promise that their parents and younger siblings will soon follow. But when tragedy strikes, the three children are left orphaned, and sixteen-year-old Anh becomes the caretaker for her two younger brothers overnight.

In the years that follow, Anh and her brothers immigrate to the UK, living first in overcrowded camps and resettlement centers and then, later, in a modernizing London plagued by social inequality. Anh works in a factory to pay the bills. Minh loiters about with fellow high school dropouts. Thanh, the youngest, plays soccer with his friends after class. As they mature, each sibling reckons with survivor’s guilt, unmoored by their parents’ absence. And with every choice, their paths diverge further, until it’s unclear if love alone can keep them together.

Told through lyrical narrative threads, historical research, voices from lost family, and notes by an unnamed narrator determined to chart these siblings’ fates, Wandering Souls captures the lives of a family marked by loss yet relentless in the pursuit of a better future. With urgency and precision, it affirms that the most important stories are those we claim for ourselves, establishing Cecile Pin as a masterful new literary voice.

Book Review

Wandering Souls is a debut novel about three siblings who flee Vietnam after the war ahead of their parents and siblings. When tragedy strikes, Anh, the oldest sibling, is left to care for her two brothers while navigating refugee camps and settlement in a new land. It is a story ultimately about grief, duty, identity, and survival.

In Vietnamese culture, there is a belief that if a person is not buried at their home, the soul will be unable to rest and wander the earth. Wandering Souls illustrates this belief on multiple levels – through both the living and the death – as they are lost, looking for refuge, and finding a new home.

Cecile Pin primarily tells the story of Anh and her brothers in this short but impactful novel through three intertwined narratives. Anh is the main narrator while her dead brother Dao, who is a rootless ghost, and a third, mysterious and scholarly narrator provide unique perspective and context to the tale. There is also couple chapters told by an American GI who took part in “Operation Wandering Souls”. Despite being a rather simple and straightforward story, the narratives provide a powerful, complex, and deeply personal look at unresolved grief, healing, and the intergenerational trauma of refugees. What results is a beautiful, compelling novel that pulled at my heart strings.

I find it difficult to pinpoint what makes Wandering Souls such a moving tale. Pin’s writing is concise and clear but also poignant and tender. She manages to skillfully evoke quiet longing that permeates the page.

For me, Wandering Souls fell a bit short when it came to the amount of detail and character development. Pin focuses the story mainly on the big events in the siblings lives, skipping over the quieter moments. I thought this was a missed opportunity to detail the pervasiveness of grief, the struggle to navigate a new place and language, and the attempt to find what feels like home again. In addition, Pin failed to characterize the siblings beyond their position in the family (dutiful older sister, rebellious middle child, etc.). Anh is the most developed character but I still did not feel like I fully understood her. Beyond her grief and need to take care of her brothers, Anh’s motivations and feelings are unknown. I think more pages spent on knowing the characters would have made Wandering Souls a richer novel that resonated more. Because the characters felt a bit distant, and therefore, were difficult to fully connect to, I am not sure how long with story will stay with me.

Overall, Wandering Souls is a strong debut novel that tells the important story of Vietnamese boat people and the experience of resettlement in an unfamiliar country. I highly recommend reading it, and I look forward to what Pin writes next.

Overall Rating

Character Development

RECOMMENDED

Genre Literary Fiction

Publication Date March 21, 2023

2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist

Storygraph Rating 4.37 stars

Goodreads Rating 4.29 stars

Note: I received an advance reader’s copy of this book from its publisher, Henry Holt & Co. Books. Regardless, I always provide a fair and honest review.

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Wandering Souls

By cecile pin.

A nh is just 16 when she loses everything. At the end of the Vietnam War , Anh and her younger brothers Thanh and Minh are sent on a boat to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, their sights set on a new life in the U.S. The arrangement is meant to be temporary—the trio’s parents and their younger siblings are supposed to join them soon after—but time stretches on as Anh and her brothers await their arrival. Eventually, they learn the devastating truth: their family didn’t survive the journey, leaving Anh, Thanh, and Minh alone in a land where they have nothing and no one. Cecile Pin’s transporting debut novel is impressively compact, telling a multigenerational—and at times mystical—story of duty, grief, and legacy in just 240 swift and moving pages. — Lucy Feldman

Buy Now: Wandering Souls on Bookshop | Amazon

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All the Sinners Bleed

Wandering Souls

• Vidéo --> Vidéo

• Dessin : ZELIHAN
• Scénario : ZELIHAN
• Editeur VF : H2T
• Type : Global-Manga
• Genre : Aventure , Fantastique
• Illustration : n&b + couleurs
• Origine : France - 2020
• Commercialisation : stoppée

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Derniers commentaires

De BakeNeko [ 102 Pts ], le 29 Mars 2024 à 22h59

Petit manga sympa à lire même si je n'ai pas trop accrochée à la fin. Et les dessins sont plutôt jolies mais j'ai un peu de mal avec le design d'Ayten.

De Kourama , le 30 Septembre 2020 à 14h03

Ce manga est génial il y a un peu de vigilance mais ça va ce manga est niveau 5em 

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Lost Minds, Wandering Souls 3: A Collection of Short Horror Fantasy Stories Paperback – April 15, 2022

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• Print length 113 pages
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• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
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