About the Book:
Souls Left Behind by Fan Wu
Translated by Honey Watson
We were the Chinese Labour Corps, all 140,000 of us. Sailing eastwards in the final years of the Great War, youth bound to toil behind the trenches of France. Too many of us will never see home again.
Anne Zhang’s father is missing, the feast for his 85th birthday is going cold.
Pride, desperation or hope? Meaningless amid the horror. Somehow I survived, and with Marguerite’s help found roots in this foreign land.
Never one to share a burden, the years since mother’s passing have only claimed the few who remember a painful past.
The battlefields have long since scabbed over with cornflowers. My comrades stare back at me as gravestones. I tend to them, lest they be reduced to forgotten characters of a language that no local understands.
No one told Anne of their stories, nor does she have time to listen.
When I’m gone, who will speak for us?
Bookish Thoughts and Reflections:
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| Men of the Chinese Labour Corps unload a lorry at Boulogne on August 12, 1917. |
I owe my reading of Souls Left Behind to the references K.F. Kuang made to the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) in Yellowface. Kuang’s fiction centers on a stolen manuscript inspired by the history of the CLC, but it doesn’t explore the material directly. The omission inspired a search for a novel that would fill the gap, a search that led directly to Fan Wu’s 2024 release.Though officially neutral for much of the First World War, China allowed labor recruitment for the French and British campaigns to begin in 1916. By the end of the conflict, some 140,000 Chinese citizens would accept the terms of these contracts and lend themselves to the most backbreaking functions of Entente operations.Fan Wu explores the experiences of these men through Delun. Unlike most Labour Corps recruits, Delun is the son of a wealthy merchant and is driven to enlist by his disdain for the life and cultural mores his parents impose on him. His decision to enlist changes the trajectory of his life and sends him more than halfway around the world to the front lines of northern France.A testament to the CLC’s oft-forgotten and overlooked contributions, Souls Left Behind highlights the physical hardship of digging trenches, repairing roads and railways, filling sandbags, building munitions depots, and staffing factories while examining the emotional trauma of trench warfare, familial estrangement, racism, and cultural isolation.Delun’s journey is historically fascinating, and I admire how it illustrates the experiences of his real-life counterparts. I also appreciate how his relationships with characters like Miss Lu, Marguerite, and Boss Cai fleshed out and layered the narrative. The story weakens in the final chapters when it shifts in favor of Anne’s comparatively underdeveloped storyline, but I still enjoyed the time I spent with Souls Left Behind and would have no trouble recommending it to readers looking for fresh and untapped perspectives.
