It is a truism that people often do not realize when a life-changing decision has been made.
Karissa Chen writes about how her novel Homeseeking (2025) came about in her “Dearest Reader” note at the beginning of the book.
She had seen a photo of her maternal grandfather, how he had left for Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War at 19. Three decades later, he returned to mainland China to find his mother had passed. Chen writes:
As a child, this type of separation felt unfathomable to me. As an adult, I became obsessed with learning about the history that lays behind the defining heartbreak of my grandfather’s life.
She describes her core question this way: “When forces out of your control tear you away from your loved ones, how do you survive the regret and grief? And how do you—if it is even possible—find home again?”
Homeseeking’s first chapter opens in 1947 in a neighborhood lane in Shanghai. The various peddlers move through with wares, with the night soil collector, and others. It is just another day in a country that is at the tail end of a long and brutal civil war. Shanghai is no longer the international city it was, and it is just a few years out from falling to the Communists. A young man, Wang Haiwen, has enlisted to fight on the side of the Nationalist army, the KMT. This common day is momentous for his life trajectory.
He is leaving behind his family and siblings, but he is also leaving behind Zhang Suji (“Suchi”), a little girl who became his friend when they were both in the same class at about age 7.
The next time they meet again is 60 years later. Both have become part of the Chinese and Taiwanese diaspora, and both are in LA, in California. They meet at 99 Ranch, a popular Asian foods grocery store, and he recognizes her, and they share some pleasantries. They meet again soon thereafter at a birthday party, replete with humor and a wonderful spread of food.
The larger Chinese American community is a fairly close one. The older members are still trying to fix up singles with other singles because there is a cultural value to pairing up. This novel combines romance with history, in a highly readable text. The scenes evoked are cognizable as very human and culturally Chinese. The romantic love evoked is more patient Eastern and considerate than the fireworks and Hollywood Western sense.
Meanwhile, the novel engages flashbacks, with Suchi’s life advancing in time, and Howard’s life going back in time. The novel interweaves the two main character’s lives with historic-level changes in the world. Along the way, there have been seismic changes at the personal level but also at the societal one. All have experienced losses along the way. The different characters have different name spellings in their different locales and time periods, evocative of the Japanese governance of Shanghai, Shanghainese, and then the switch to Mandarin (Tsan Suji / Zhang Suchi), and so on.
One of the characters educates Suchi about the then-modern history of China:
The rest of the world grew without us. They did it in terrible ways—they conquered other lands and enslaved the bodies of men for labor. They stole from places and used what they stole to build factories and bigger guns and ships. So that one day, when the foreign men returned to our shores, we were unprepared. We had stayed the same while they had become powerful. They wanted our tea and porcelain and they no longer wanted to be friends—they planned to take what they wanted without asking. They tricked us by poisoning us, little by little, with opium. They made us weak. And now they are everywhere, treating us like dogs in our own lands.
The period of colonization left the Chinese with a sense of “never again.” Suchi is first attracted to Haiwen when she hears him playing violin in their neighboring shikumen-style homes. Theirs is a growing friendship through mutual acts of kindness even though Suchi is more sparkly and outgoing, and Haiwen is more shy.
Karissa Chen captures well how human connections may spark over some core connections of personality in youth and still retain a spark into old age after decades of separation. She captures people aspiring to goodness and loyalty but who fall short, who compromise themselves in different ways. The lived lives of men and women differ in core ways, in this novel, perhaps because of the historical context and perhaps as residua of culture.
She shows how choices of selfishness and selflessness have long-term repercussions on people’s relationships. In the novel, people live their lives quickly and evolve over time, even as a core personality continues. Long memories may color the present. People live lives without realizing perhaps that all around are miraculous outcomes, among the mundane.
Karissa Chen’s question underlying this novel humanizes the lost connections when people venture abroad from their localities. They lose some of their former ties, but they do gain and build others. Hers is a sentimental re-reading of history, a civilized overlay of hankering and regret, at the realization of what is irretrievably gone. Such lifelong separations were not uncommon for the Chinese and for others, given the cost of escaping poverty, exploring, adventuring, and having a say in the world’s shaping (such as for Wang Haiwen). Those who make those moves take their chances and pay the costs and count the gains.
Homeseeking suggests that people have an ache for home, as something of a state of mind, maybe a place of nostalgia. But home is more than that: Perhaps it is something that can be salvaged and resuscitated after decades of separation.
This novel reads a little like it could be a made-for-television movie in its empathetic portrayal of likeable older characters, whose path in older age flashes them back to difficult pasts.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
