Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls is about three siblings who leave Vietnam in 1978 and make it to Hong Kong. Their parents and younger siblings were supposed to follow on the next boat. They are found dead on the shore instead, and the three are left with each other.
Anh is the oldest. The book opens with her saying she couldn’t sleep for three days after she found out about Koh Kra.
In 1979, Vietnamese refugees crossing the Gulf of Thailand were taken to an island called Koh Kra, where women and children were raped and killed by Thai fishermen. This massacre pins through this story in sharp and searing ways. Pin never stages it for you. She lets it surface where it wants to. “But Anh knew that fear was no barrier of viciousness, that it could be its vessel.”
The book is best on what survival does to a family. Anh becomes the mother because there is no one else, and resentment follows. It reminded me of the ways my sister gave up parts of her childhood for mine.
Pin is also good on Britain in the eighties, which was hostile to immigrants in ways that don’t fit the story the country tells about itself. Not the land of The Beatles and The Stones, of Bowie and Queen.
Partway through, the narration shifts to Dao, the youngest brother, who is dead and watching the others from limbo. That sent me to Operation Wandering Soul, which I had never heard of. In 1970, U.S. Army engineers recorded altered voices and funeral music in a Saigon studio and played them into the jungle at night from helicopters and boats. One voice is a dead soldier talking to the living.
“My body is gone. I am dead, my family. Tragic, how tragic! My friends, I come back to let you know that I am dead. I am dead. I am in hell. … Friends, while you are still alive … go home! … Go home, my friends—before it is too late.”
The tape worked on the belief that a person who doesn’t get a proper burial roams among the living, their soul wandering in pain forever. It worked on the men it was aimed at and on the men playing it. Crews were told not to play it within earshot of South Vietnamese forces.