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The book also time shifts between 1978 and 2022. For the most part the time of settlement in Hong Kong and the Uk is at the heart of the story. Thi Anh’s maturity to older age and motherhood is skimmed over very rapidly. I didn’t think this adversely affected the book which wasn’t really about one individual, I felt. I paired my reading with excellent audio narration by Aoife Hinds, Ioanna Kimbook and Ainsleigh Barber that brought these characters and this story to life.
International Passenger Survey (ONS) -- this was suspended between March 2020 and January 2021 because of coronavirus (COVID-19) Set mostly in the late 1970s and 1980s in a variety of locales, Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls is a story about three Vietnamese siblings who take their large family’s first steps towards the American dream, only to end up orphaned, moved from one refugee camp to another, and ultimately placed in the United Kingdom where they attempt to put together the “better lives” their mother and father had dreamed for them. The tale is primarily told from the point-of-view of eldest daughter Anh as she and her brothers Minh and Thanh cope with the danger, loss, grief, uncertainty, disappointment, loneliness, and prejudice typical of the refugee experience. Although images work best, it is also possible to pin text. Use Share as Image, which lets you highlight text anywhere on the web and turn it into an image.Without being unduly complex, there was a lot going on with the structure. Ghostly Dao seemed at first to be a bit artificial, but this made total sense when Pin introduced an excerpt from 1967 with American troops on the ground in Vietnam. Operation Wandering Soul (from which the book title is derived) was a real thing; a propaganda campaign and psychological warfare initiative. Dao’s interjections reminded me of two recent Booker prize winning novels; ( The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and Lincoln in The Bardo , both of which featured unsettled ghostly presences in an afterworld.
In terms of form – what is at heart a relatively simply, if movingly written tale, is built out by a number of other different (and it has to be said at times not entirely cohesive) elements. Social mobility slowly takes form, with someone working at an accounting firm as a secretary and other brothers returning to careers after more rebellious phases: As he learned a life of pragmatism and compromiseI believe that Pin's purpose is to be 1) disconcerting and 2) weird as shit, and it succeeds on both fronts.
After some weeks it becomes clear that the rest of their family have not made the trip safely, and the three siblings have no option but to travel on to refugee camps, then onto resettlement camps, finally arriving in the UK and not the United States as they had planned. Pin's novel does not quite work, but I admire her ambition and drive to piece together a narrative about the destiny of the so-called boat people. Set in 1978, we meet a Vietnamese family who flees their home country, but the parents and four siblings drown - only three of the children make it to England where they struggle to make a life for themselves under Thatcherism. The kids stand pars pro toto for the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the UK, and Pin employs shifting perspectives to widen the family story to a whole panorama, among the voices are a second-generation immigrant, a ghost and two soldiers involved in the Operation Wandering Soul during the Vietnam War. The author also adds in historical documents, news reports, etc. pp. As I said I am not entirely sure the sections all fully gel – there seems to be a slightly jarring discontinuity at times when moving to the first party sections. However thematically they certainly do – with the titular idea really holding the story together and providing a way to wrap up both the narrative part and the Dao sections in a way which I found both satisfying and moving. Pin’s prose is polished and lucid although it’s sometimes more practical than lyrical, rooted in careful research, down to the detailed descriptions of the refugee camps where people like Anh were held during the late 1970s and early 80s. From my perspective it’s not a great piece but it is an extremely promising first novel. There’s a sense of something deeply-felt driving Pin’s portrayal of Anh and her family’s fate, potent enough to sweep me up and carry me along in its wake. If Wandering Souls was made available for free to the constituencies of the Uk who seem to be hostile to migrants in 2023, then it might improve the quality of the discussion that’s presently taking place.
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The police find Stan's body. To their astonishment, he is still alive. Some time later, Ursula and Stan return to the house to visit Pin. Ursula tells Pin that she's going on a trip with Stan. Pin inquires as to whether she's heard from Leon. Ursula replies "No." Pin says that he misses him a great deal. Ursula agrees. As the story ends, it is revealed that Ursula is talking to Leon, who has taken Pin's persona. After Ursula destroyed her brother's only companion with an axe, Leon had a psychotic break, which left only the dummy's side of his personality to completely take over. Leon has essentially become Pin, in the flesh. Pin became the victim of bad timing as by the time production had finished, New World Pictures was in the process of dissolving their film division and while Pin had been intended to be a final theatrical release, the company decided against it at the last minute. [2] A screening of the film was met with a negative response, and rather than invest any time or resources into Pin New World instead released it direct to video. [2] The film eventually started getting more attention in 1991 where prints in Manhattan and San Francisco were given successful runs with many critics declaring the film to be overlooked and becoming a Cult film. [2]
Leon and Ursula discuss the sex education they've had, and Ursula admits she is looking forward to being older, as she thinks she will enjoy 'the urge'. The film segues to the point where they are in their teens, and Leon discovers graffiti suggesting Ursula sleeps around. He discovers her in a car with boy who he assaults, and makes her promise never to do this again. Later she admits to him that she is pregnant, and Leon - via Pin - insists that they tell their father, who performs an abortion on fifteen year old Ursula. The mix between non-fiction and family story works well, despite the novel feels a tad didactic at moments.
Pin explores (exploits?) a skewed sibling dynamic seeped in sex, seclusion, and secrecy. Following the untimely death of their parents, Ursula and Leon close the curtains on the outside world and wrap themselves in the comfort of their large home and larger inheritance. Outsiders are frowned upon, unless they're not human... That's where Pin, a plastic body, once their father's (who happened to be a doctor) visual aide in his practice, now, a permanent resident and family member/lover...yeah let that sink in... The timing of this novel about Vietnamese migrants and their experiences as asylum-seekers in the UK feels especially poignant: if the country's new Illegal Migrants Bill—introduced in parliament less than a week after Wandering Souls was published—comes to pass, stories like this one could become nearly impossible to tell outside of fiction, with their bearers, the people undertaking unimaginably dangerous journeys in small boats to escape the atrocities in their home countries, becoming effectively outlawed.
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