“After I learned about Koh Kra I couldn’t sleep for three days,” declares the narrator of Cecile Pin’s moving and meticulously researched debut novel. The Koh Kra tragedy occurred in 1979 on a 100-acre swatch of land off the coast of southern Thailand. There, a gang of fishermen intercepted a boat of Vietnamese refugees. Over the course of 22 nightmarish days the women and girls were repeatedly raped, while the men and boys were robbed, murdered or left to die at sea. The Koh Kra massacre is one of the real-life ordeals foregrounded in Pin’s heartfelt and informative portrayal of the Vietnamese refugee experience and the psychological and emotional tolls of survival and cultural assimilation.
The book opens three years after the American troops have withdrawn, with Vietnam in a state of political and economic turmoil. The mass exodus following the Vietnam war resulted in an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 dying at sea, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Wandering Souls examines the human cost of large-scale tragedy through the story of 16-year-old Anh, her 13-year-old brother Minh and their 10-year-old brother Thanh, who are separated from their parents and four younger siblings when the family attempts to make the perilous journey to Hong Kong on two separate boats. Tragically, only Anh, Minh and Thanh arrive at their destination.
What follows is a piercing saga of innocence being rapidly replaced by hard-won experience. The siblings are shunted around refugee camps and detention centres before their application to emigrate to the United States is rejected. They find themselves in the United Kingdom, which “wasn’t part of the plan. It wasn’t in the life [their] parents mapped out for them.” Thatcherite Britain, with its hostility to immigrants, is far more complex and discordant than its cultural image abroad as “the land of The Beatles and The Stones, of Bowie and Queen”.
They struggle to assimilate in 80s east London, idealising the America they never got a chance to experience: “In America there were more of them, a real community of Vietnamese and Asians instead of just a few clusters scattered across London.” Anh, the eldest, takes on the role of caregiver, forgoing her education to work in a garment factory. Minh struggles to find employment and turns to petty crime; it is the youngest and thus the most socially malleable, Thanh, who finds it easiest to adapt. Wandering Souls excels at articulating the culturally and generationally specific sting of the immigrant experience, and interrogating the myth of the model minority, with its resulting effects of soul-searching and alienation. Yet the novel is not all misery and trauma; there are warm, wonderful scenes of camaraderie and affection, the quotidian peace of shared meals and amicable silences.
The siblings’ journey from their hometown of Vung Tham is mostly told from the point of view of Anh, but the hybrid narrative is interwoven with the voice of Dao, their lost youngest brother, watching them from limbo; an account of Operation Wandering Soul, the campaign of psychological warfare enacted by US forces during the Vietnam war; and most intriguingly – to initially jarring effect – an unnamed narrator metafictionally compiling the story. “I am overly wary of writing cliches,” she says, “so much so that I hesitated for weeks before mentioning … rice on the first page.”
Wandering Souls is written in clean, precise prose that is both highly readable and restrained, imbuing the plot with a clear-headed narrative acumen impressive for a debut novel. If the matter-of-factness occasionally veers into slightly flat affect, because of a self-effacing style and refusal to capitulate to sentimentality, this seems due to Pin’s sensitive handling of historical material rather than a dearth of empathy or genuine emotion. On the contrary, Wandering Souls is a poignant saga with its grieving, beating heart firmly in the right place, and heralds the arrival of an ambitious and promising new talent.
• Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
