WANDERING SOULS

The members of a family of Vietnamese refugees—all wandering souls in their own ways—seek to understand the past while searching for hope in the present.

“Everything will be alright, you’ll see,” 16-year-old Thi Anh promises her younger sister Van one night in 1978 as she and two of her brothers leave Vung Tham for a perilous boat journey to Hong Kong. Her parents have promised to follow with her other siblings, and once the family reunites, they plan to make their way together to an uncle’s house in America. Three months later, though, Anh and her brothers are orphaned, and they must make their way alone through refugee camps toward their assigned resettlement location in England. As the siblings adapt to a new language and culture, they also must struggle against the prejudice tacitly accepted by a Thatcher-ite government that hides its own hostility beneath a hospitable veneer. Framed by the first-person narrative of Anh’s writer daughter Jane in the present day, the novel shifts among multiple perspectives, including that of Anh; her daughter Jane, writing from the present day; the ghost of her brother Dao; two American soldiers involved in the real-life Operation Wandering Soul in 1967 Vietnam; and found historical documents. Pin handles the alternating perspectives skillfully, though Jane’s voice is the most fully lived in and original, offering a tender and rigorous exploration of the stakes of writing about trauma as she tries to “carve out a story between the macabre and the fairy tale, so that a glimmer of truth can appear.” In her meditations on storytelling, Jane recalls Joan Didion, among other literary greats, an invocation that could feel clichéd. Pin earns it, however, as Jane delves into the cultural, psychological, and political stakes of grief and what happens when writing about the past “[rips] open wounds” she never knew she had.

A tender and rigorous debut from the new Didion of the Asian diaspora.