Paying tribute to the Vietnam refugee crisis after the Vietnam War (South-Central Vietnam, South China Sea, Hong Kong and British refugee camps; 1967 to 2023): “Knowledge allows remembering, and remembering is honoring,” says one of the many voices narrating Cecile Pin’s memorable Wandering Souls. They echo her literary mission. 

Stirred by a “visceral need to know” what happened to Pin’s mother’s Vietnamese family when they fled their village in Southeast Vietnam after the Communists took over the entire country, ending the long-lasting Vietnam War. Pin invents a Vietnamese family to reflect her mother’s, part of the 200,000 to 600,000 refugees who were lost in the South China Sea.

By PH2 Phil Eggman
[Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons

These innocent victims of war came to be known as the “boat people.” A demeaning term that characterizes their only means of escape: overflowing, dilapidated fishing vessels ill-equipped to protect from the perilous seas. The insulting label also signifies the prejudice the Vietnamese refugees encountered.

Pin expects a lot from her slim, 220+ page novel, given the complexity, fog of war, and the enormity of the humanitarian crisis that ensued.

The greatest strength of Wandering Souls is its clarity. Achieved through precision-like, purposeful prose that tells a complicated story by choices made stylistically, mixing genres, and deciding what to tell and what to leave out.

By not relying on a single genre, historical fiction, but using many – narrative non-fiction, memoirist, journalistic, and poetry-in-prose – integrating varied perspectives enables the use of fewer words aimed at providing the scope and haunting of a gruesome war yet to be fully reckoned with. Prose that follows a less-is-more approach, inspired by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway.

Brevity allows us to absorb the monumental events and consequences of a highly controversial war fought in jungles, along with a legacy of psychological trauma, prolonged grief, sorrow, shame, and survivor’s guilt. “Why me not them?” the central character Anh asks. Skillful conciseness renders a potency we hadn’t seen coming.

To make sure we understand where Pin is coming from she lays it out: “The truth is, I don’t want to write about death. I want women to live. I want children playing in the fields . . . I want justice and I want peace; I want life and I want delight.” She also wants “magic powers for the armless and harmless,” and a “reckoning.”

Through fifteen-year-old Anh’s survival story, assuming the role of mother and father to two of her younger brothers, Minh (thirteen) and Thanh (ten), after their parents and four other siblings perished at sea, Pin still wants to “focus on moments of joy” rather than the “wretchedness of war.” That’s a lot of forgiveness wrapped up in what she chooses not to dwell on.

Wandering Souls finds the right balance. Literary magic in doing so.

Magical too because magical realism is infused into the narrative through a ghostly voice that wanders between the Beyond and Earth in a poetic format. Brief, three-page chapters based on real-life news accounts also add immeasurably to a broader context on ghostly war propaganda, the ghosts of torture on the high seas, and then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s deceit about wanting to welcome 19,000 refugees in two waves. Like America’s leaders who lied about winning an unwinnable war.

Great human disasters, natural or manmade, put bureaucrats to a test not only as public officials but as human beings,” wrote Richard Holbrooke who served in Vietnam and was instrumental in crafting America’s foreign policy in Vietnam. Lies broke the trust in government we see today. Many argue America was never the same, including Ken Burns in his 18-hour documentary, The Vietnam War. Ending the novel in March 2023 serves to make this fifty-year-old story eerily current in helping us understand America’s struggles to preserve democracy.

Ghostly stories are part of Vietnamese literature. For good reason. Vietnamese culture believes that unless death is respected, memorialized, souls wander like ghosts. Pin choose Dao, Anh’s seven-year-old brother who died at sea as the ghostly voice, rather than her parents, emphasizing the theme of lost youth and innocence. Symbolic of “unsettled” deaths that do haunt, giving rise to the supernatural magic Pin is after.

“I could see the boat from above,

Except now it was sunk beneath the waves,

and bodies were floating all around it.”

It’s not possible to grasp the flight and plight of the two million Vietnamese who fled after the Fall of Saigon. Zooming in on one family and choosing which grim historical events to include or not, Pin whittles down faceless history for us to visualize. The Vietnam War was an extraordinarily agonizing political war that set off a massive, decade-long protest movement in America. Seen up-close and personal, you won’t forget Pin’s story. Her intention.

The global relevancy persists. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) estimates 30 million refugees wandering, a featureless statistic skyrocketing with as many as 18 million Ukrainian refugees displaced and separated from their families, including 5 million children. Mind-boggling numbers that don’t include the dislocation of millions of Syrian refugees, and countless others from other countries. We’re numb to these staggering numbers, but not to the suffering and struggles of a few.

Anh, Minh, and Thanh’s sea journey took them to Hong Kong. To two-weeks of quarantine in a guarded, dehumanizing detention center. Then to the Tai Tak Refugee Camp near the Hong Kong airport. “A miniature version of Vietnam,” with 10,000 Vietnamese refugees at the time.

You’ll see why Anh and her brothers never made it to America as envisioned. When the three are finally approved to leave Hong Kong, they’re assigned Hut #23, shared with nine more people, at the Sopley Refugee Camp in Hampshire, England. Living in WWII “brutal and sinister, square barracks made of grey concrete” in another foreign land wasn’t that much better. “Resettlement was a lottery, with winners and losers,” though a Red Cross nurse shines a kindly light and the trio make a few friends. Still, they’re caged up with their fates unknown.

How to rise above the “otherness”? Who among the three does? Who’s so broken they can’t?

Those joyful moments are captured in deliciously appealing Vietnamese cuisine, an important aspect of the country’s regional cultures. Food brings comfort, nostalgic memories of home, and a sense of community with other Vietnamese refugees. Music is also seen as a “refuge.” Joyous too are the efforts made to learn English, and Anh’s persistence in wanting to “settle, not wander.”

The US has yet to realize a National Vietnam Museum. Plans for one are underway in Texas, highlighted in this short video:

 

 

Judging by the 5 million annual visitors who come to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC to pay their respects to the 58,000 Americans who died fighting the Vietnam War, a museum to pay respects to the Vietnamese refugees would fill a void. (The real number of veterans is another 500,000 who bear the psychiatric scars of the war: PTSD, depression, alcoholism, homelessness, suicide.)

“What is the point of opening up the door to her past?” Anh ponders at one point.

The point is the reckoning is not over. “What better way of processing our past, than by rewriting it?” Pin asks and answers.

Lorraine

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