“Souls Left Behind” by Fan Wu

Fina Wu (WikiCommons)

Some 140,000 men were recruited from China during the Great War by the Allied Forces. Their mission was not to fight but to labour on the front lines. In exchange, they would (in theory) receive a salary and decent rations. The unsung heroes of the Chinese Labour Corps, whose contribution to the First World War has been mostly overlooked by historians, are given their due recognition in this touching third novel from bilingual writer, Fan Wu.

The story follows the life of one such recruit. Although in reality most were impoverished farmers and dockers, author Wu makes her protagonist a scion of the educated elite. Zhang Delun is 17, idealistic and less than impressed by his impending arranged marriage to a daughter of another rich family in Wuping. On his wedding night, he skips town, eventually joining up at the registration office whereupon he is promptly shipped to Canada and then France.

Life in the 1917 war zone is grim: the recruits are treated more like prisoners than volunteers and forbidden to mix with the local population. The 12th battalion travels between several areas, living in abandoned trenches or camps surrounded by barbed wire. They are plagued by lice, frostbite and fever, all the time policed by whip-wielding British taskmasters. Worst of all, the very people the recruits are helping mostly reward them with contempt, simply for being Chinese.

Delun survives through friendship, especially with a former rickshaw driver, known by his nickname, Two-Horses. The camaraderie of the men is the highlight of the novel. Chinese characters are often distinguished by regional accents so, in the clever English translation, one recruit speaks in the Cockney dialect which drops the “h” from the start of words while another is a Scot who says “havenae” for “have not”. The vivacity and humour of their repartee both lightens and heightens the contrast with their bleak circumstances

When peace is declared, Delun is reassigned to a factory in Lyon where he is trained as a welder by the feisty Marguerite. Despite condemnation and racial abuse from all levels of society, the couple fall in love and, once Delun secures a divorce, get married. But, no matter how hard Delun (now known as David) works, the discrimination continues. The couple decide to move to Paris as a fresh start. He is so keen to erase his ignominious (as he sees it) origins in the Labour Corps that when Two-Horses comes to visit, David sends him away.

 

Souls Left Behind, Fan Wu,  Honey Watson (trans) (Sinoist, Alain Charles Asia, May 2024)
Souls Left Behind, Fan Wu, Honey Watson (trans) (Sinoist, Alain Charles Asia, May 2024)

The main, first-person narrative is book-ended and interspersed with a second story which reflects and emphasizes its themes of shame and the search for identity. Written in the third person, it describes a journey taken by David, now aged 85, to revisit the original sites and achieve some kind of reconciliation, both with Two-Horses and himself. Along the way there is time for contemplation and insight, as well as an opportunity for Wu to make a comment on the recording of events. She writes:

 

What, he wondered, is history? Is it just the process of scraping moss from stones, to see what lies beneath? If the moss goes untouched, then it’s as if the history it conceals had never even existed.

 

It is left to Anne, David’s daughter, to address the injustice. She too has suffered discrimination, such as name-calling at school, to which she had “given in, remained silent, even resented her parents.” Over time, she has internalized these issues, seeing her career as a means to earn respect and become “truly French”. It is only when she learns of David’s experiences, which he has kept secret, that a solution becomes visible. With the help of her friend, Clara, a First World War historian, Anne manages to get David’s story, and those of the many others like him, heard by school children and museums. Wu’s message is clear: only by fully exploring our history can we understand our present.


Jane Wallace is a Hong Kong-born journalist and author living in London.