The sweeping epic Homeseeking by Karissa Chen is mostly about something strongly felt but not completely tangible: the immigrant’s phantom limb. It centers on conflict, love, and family. An emotional echo from a location left behind that shapes identity and emotional life, a metaphor for an endless sense of absence. Chen’s characters have such unseen significance. Memories of home, their previous residence, and the people they had to leave behind haunt them.
The book examines how past attachments do not just go away with time or distance. They remain, tormenting the psyche and enabling epiphanies about lives that never existed in dreams, conversations, and small life rituals.
Between the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution, as well as the emotional and cultural dissonance associated with immigration, history describes China’s immense turmoil. It takes a broad approach. The plot is anchored in the close-knit, intimate relationship between Suchi and Haiwen, two lovers, against the expansive backdrop of history. During the times and the war that tore their nation apart, they met as kindergarteners, became friends, and eventually became lovers in their adolescence.
When Haiwen decides to enlist in the Nationalist army (out of devotion to his low-income family), their love story takes a difficult turn. The decision splits them apart and sends them out to start new lives. The decision’s emotional ramifications last for decades. They will reunite in 2008 in a different nation and on a different platform. Haiwen (recently widowed) is drowning in remorse and loneliness, while Suchi is currently in Los Angeles, caring for her grandkids.
The novel traces the independent trajectories of Suchi and Haiwen across six decades, as they navigate personal and political upheaval while traveling through Shanghai, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States. It’s a story of spatial displacement and psychological transformation created by time, space, and the weight of buried memories.
The narrative’s design is hitting: the chapters rotate between the two protagonists’ views and various timelines. Suchi’s narrative extends straight, chronologically, starting with their childhood encounter and progressing steadily through the years. In contrast, Haiwen’s narrative unfolds in reverse, starting from their reunion in 2008 and gradually working its way backward through the pivotal events that had brought him to it.
It is a formalized option that is stylistic rather than anything else, and it tells us something more profound about the type of individual these characters are now. With Suchi, time has eroded a feeling of emotional toughness; she is a woman who will not look back, who always continues to move forward as a way of surviving. Her linear writing evidences that thinking.
Haiwen, on the other hand, is made soft by time. A grieving widower who feels isolated, he turns inward, finding solace in the act of recollection. His reverse-order chapters mirror the way memory works: piecemeal, emotion-tinted, and more textured than the present instant.
As the characters mature and travel between borders, their names change along with them, for geographic displacement but for transformation in identity and self-image. For Suchi, the transformation starts when she and her sister escape the Cultural Revolution by moving to Hong Kong, which introduces a new array of difficulties.
Struggling to survive, Suchi is forced to work at a sleazy nightclub, an unstable job which leaves her little choice but to marry a wealthy but cruel man. He dominates her body and choices, but her own identity, even her name. He insists on calling her Soukei, the Cantonese pronunciation of Suchi, indicating how he exercises his dominance and how her identity is forced to change to adjust to the needs of a new social and linguistic order.
In Soukei, we also see the timid, intimidated side of a woman who strode with confidence and defiance. Her name change is the result of years of struggle, survival, and emotional cost. It is a psychological transformation, one of withdrawal into wariness and self-preservation.
Similarly, in Howard, we also have Haiwen splintered into several selves. There is one who has managed to establish a new life in America. Then there is the Haiwen who could never recover from loving Suchi, that part of himself that remains emotionally invested in that initial, youthful romance, and the one who lives in the state in between.
Chen uses such shattered identities to reflect how aging, trauma, displacement, and healing make us who we are. It is not about name-changes or external situations but how people are slowly worn away, reshaped, and reborn by time and experience. Suchi and Haiwen, while altered by decades of absence and deprivation, still have the core of what they were when they were in love as children. Their character evolutions do not appear jagged. Just as Chen’s prose slips elegantly among Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Taiwanese, her characters shift between periods and identity.
The ambition and sweep of Homeseeking are impressive, but when you factor in Chen’s craftsmanship and execution, the novel’s richness is even more mind-boggling. It is hard not to be impressed by the way she weaves together the strands of the story and creates a novel that is expansive yet intimate.
Chen’s control is evident in her bold reversal of the chronology of Haiwen’s story, which starts with the couple’s reunion in California. On initial impression, the gesture can seem risky. Instead of losing suspense, however, it draws us into the tale.
The book heightens our good, concentrating on Suchi and Haiwen’s emotive reunion. Even after sixty years, we are dragged into their laughter and joy, rejecting a lingering essence of memories and recollections.
However, it also propels us forward with questions: What happened in the intervening years between their first meeting and reunion, how did time and circumstance change them into the people they have become in 2008, and perhaps most intriguingly, what happened to the families who shaped their early years, their childhoods, and their initial love?
There are moments when Chen’s messaging strikes as slightly heavy-handed, sometimes even on the verge of the polemical. It is most notable when she tries to make an explicit statement or react to some specific social or political matter. In such instances, the narrative can sometimes lose some of its complexity, and the message might come across as explicit or strident than it would have to be, but it does not take away from the novel’s overall strength.
When Chen focuses on the heart-emotional realities, her story comes alive. Whether love, loss, identity, or belonging, whatever she writes about, her interpretation is evocative and complex. With her characters, Chen pulls us into the essence of these emotional places, and once she taps the rawness of the emotions, the tale gets engrossing. It is here, in emotional veracity and intensity, that her craft stands apart.
As a whole, Chen’s Homeseeking is a brilliant novel of identity, displacement, and affective nuance. In its complicated form and emotional complexity, as well as the richness and depth of its characters, the novel reflects the immigrant condition as much as the inexorable reach of the past. While most of the time, the book’s messaging is too on the nose, the richness of Chen’s story and the emotional authenticity of her characters make it such an unputdownable read. It is a richly imagined portrait of human change and resilience.
References
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- Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.
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- Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Hall, S. (1990). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (pp. 222–237). Lawrence & Wishart.
- LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press.
- Spence, J. D. (1990). The Search for Modern China. W.W. Norton.
