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Fan Wu Discussing the Novel Souls Left Behind
From: £4.99Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Format: Demy HB / 312pp
ISBN: 978-1-83890-597-2 (HB) / 978-1-83890-558-3 (EB)
Pricing: £15.99 (HB) / £4.99 (EB)
Thema: (FS) Family life fiction / （FXV）Journeys and voyages / (FXQ) Displacement, exile, migration
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1) The book starts with Anne’s preparation for the 85th birthday of her father, David. Why do you think David (Delun Zhang) decides to travel alone without telling Anne, especially on his birthday? When he visits the graveyard of the Chinese labourers who served in France during the First World War, he mutters the number ‘58909’, which was assigned to him as his name when he was a labourer. Discuss what this number means to David, and how naming can have a profound impact on our perceptions of ourselves and personal experiences.
2) The book uses multiple intersecting narrative threads and perspectives to create a complex and powerful emotional journey spanning two-thirds of a century. One follows the now old-age David who decides to embark on a solo journey on his 85th birthday. This is in third person. The second instance is the young David’s first-person storytelling, describing how he travelled from China to France to become a labourer and how he later fell in love and settled in France. The third narrative comes from Anne’s third-person perspective. Why do you think Fan Wu chose to use such a narrative structure in the book?
3) Souls Left Behind explores immigration, migration, and the negotiation of the belongings between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Throughout the book, the concept of ‘home’ has surfaced many times. Near the end of the book, David (Delun Zhang) ruminates on his life. “He would soon become a fallen leaf himself now, but where was his home?” He spends his last moments looking at a picture of him and Marguerite at their wedding. As for Anne, she also ponders: “Wuping Town, a name she had never even heard before, had become a real, concrete image. A Frenchwomen with the surname Zhang was suddenly related to as a small town in Shandong, thousands of miles away.” Discuss what home means to these characters, and find examples about ‘home’ in the book.
4) David is a complicated character. He was born into wealth, and was an idealist eager to transform the society he lived in, but at the same time he had to succumb to the pressure from his traditional family. He received a good education, but as a labourer in France, he lived mostly with poor, illiterate people. He was kind, and cherished integrity and morality. However, he abandoned his bride on their wedding night, and later cut off his friendship with his closest friend. He loved his French wife Marguerite deeply, but he couldn’t forgive himself for his betrayal of his parents and homeland. He was hard-working, dreaming of integrating into the French society, but he always felt that he was a ‘foreigner.’ How do you see this character?
5) Marguerite is portrayed as strong-minded and courageous. Due to societal discrimination, she and David had to have three separate weddings to finally secure their marriage. Discuss the historical context of each of their weddings.
6) Why do you think Fan Wu entitled the book, “Souls Left Behind”? Who are these souls?
7) Why is being considered “successful” so important to Anne? Why, for many years, did she avoid to ask her father about his upbringing and his early life in France? What eventually drives her decision to dig into her family history?
8) An important theme in the book is how history shapes the present and who we are, and how our memory contributes to the writing of history. Discuss how the past has shaped the main characters in the book.
9) Miss Lu is a minor character, yet her strength is felt throughout the book. In the beginning of the story, she is this young bride of an arranged marriage who “sat on the edge of the bed, still in her red veil with its dangling ornaments of pearl and gold,” with her bound feet in red embroidered shoes. She’s abandoned by her husband on her wedding night, and later is forced into a divorce. What do you think about her decisions in her life? How would you interpret her saying that she had lived a good life
10) One stop David makes during his solo trip is a village where he and many other Chinese labourers were once stationed during the first world war. In some woods close by, he discovers a carving his younger self had made on a rock. He ponders what history is. “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 existed.” Do you agree with him? In your opinion, why is it important to understand history?
11) Why do you think David chooses those particular stops on his trip? In the second half of his trip, he decides not to take a train or a bus, but rather, he would walk to Lyon. Why does he make this decision? Why does he choose Lyon as the last destination of his journey?
12) There are many personal and family secrets in this book. David, Anne, Marguerite, Miss Lu, Boss Cai, Two Horses all have things that are buried inside them. Discuss their secrets. How do these secrets affect who they are, and their decisions and actions throughout the book?
On his wedding day in 1917, Delun (David) Zhang, a wealthy and well-educated young man from a quiet Chinese northern town, flees the arranged marriage to join the Chinese Labour Corps, manual workers recruited by the British. After a treacherous journey from China to Britain, he and his Chinese peers arrive in wartime France. Treated as coolies and locked up in guarded barracks, he and his friends are soon involved in digging trenches, repairing roads, uploading ammunition, collecting corpses, and many other tasks that often endanger their lives. They also face constant injustice and discrimination.
Anguished by having betrayed his family, Zhang cherishes his bond with four other laborers, two of whom are killed subsequently by the Germans. He himself almost dies in the flu pandemic. While working at a ship factory in France, Zhang meets Marguerite, a strong-minded French girl. They fall in love despite the disapproval of French society. Zhang faces a tough choice. Does he return to his family and privileged life in China? Or does he stay in France for love, a poor and unwelcome foreigner? ”
Almost seventy years have passed. Zhang, now a widower living in Paris, has never revealed much of his past to his children. On his 85th birthday, suffering early-stage Alzheimer’s, he embarks on yet another journey to reflect on the places and people that have defined his life. His French-born daughter Anne must now discover her father’s true identity and history.
Set in France and China, Souls Left Behind is a well-researched historical novel based on true events. It’s a story of hardship, courage, betrayal, survival and love in the impossible times of the First World War.
Fan Wu is a bilingual writer, with her work published in more than ten languages. Born and raised in China, she travelled to the US for graduate studies and later worked in Silicon Valley’s high-tech sector. She holds an MA from Stanford University and now lives in California. She is the author of three novels and her short fiction has appeared in numerous leading publications, such as Granta and Ploughshares, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is also a co-founder of the Society of Heart’s Delight, which promotes interracial and intercultural dialogue, as well as a trustee and leader of Mothers’ Bridge of Love. She is the creator of the “Chinese Immigrants in Silicon Valley and Beyond” photoblog.
Honey Watson is a science fiction writer and translator living in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is a translator of both fiction and non-fiction from Mandarin into English, holding degrees from University College London and Peking University, Beijing. Her debut novel, Lessons in Birdwatching, will be released by Angry Robot books in August 2023.