Karissa Chen’s debut novel, Homeseeking, a sweeping family saga set across eight decades, is informed in part by her grandfather’s story. In her author’s note, she writes that she became interested in Chinese exiles in Taiwan a couple decades ago, just after her grandfather’s death. One of the images from her grandfather’s belongings was a photo of her grandfather crying before his mother’s grave in Shanghai. He was especially distraught because he hadn’t seen his mother since he left China just before the Communist victory in 1949 and was unable to return more than half a century later, after his mother passed away.
Before the story even begins, Chen includes quotations from Eileen Chang’s novel Half a Lifelong Romance and Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood For Love, both known for capturing the spirit and style of Old Shanghai and Old Hong Kong, respectively. These short excerpts—the latter just a quick sentence—give a quick preview of what’s to follow in the next 488 pages. Chen begins the story in 1947 Shanghai as a nightsoil collector roams through the lane homes in the early morning, while other vendors and residents just begin their day.
In his wake, stairs and hinges creek; women peek out into the alleyway to claim their overturned night stools. Crouching, they clean silt from the wooden buckets: bamboo sticks clock, clamshells rattle, water from back-door faucets glugs and splatters. By the time they have finished, the sugar porridge vendor has emerged, announcing her goods in repetitive singsong as she pushes her cart. Later, the others will join her: the tea egg man, the pear syrup candy peddler, the vegetable and rice sellers, each with their own seasoned melodies.
It’s in these lane homes that teenage sweethearts Haiwen and Suchi plan for a future together. But all is not peaceful in 1947 Shanghai. Haiwen is a violin prodigy and his family is supportive, while Suchi dreams of singing professionally, but her father wants her to follow in his footsteps, taking over as the eventual owner of his bookshop.
When Haiwen worries about an upcoming recital, Suchi suggests they visit her mother’s fortune teller so he will feel more prepared for what to expect. The fortune teller ends up predicting that the pair will keep meeting again and again throughout their lives. Haiwen and Suchi are more focused on his recital and think little of the fortune teller’s prediction.
In the late 1940s, Haiwen’s father is apprehended by the Nationalist government for mixing with Communists and the family is forced to show their allegiance to Chiang Kai-shek; Haiwen ends up enlisting. He will eventually have to leave Shanghai for Taiwan with other KMT soldiers. In a rush to leave and feeling defeated, he doesn’t tell Suchi of his departure. Exile in Taiwan was never expected to last as long as it did, so soldiers like Haiwen all assumed they would return somewhat soon, after the KMT retook China.
Suchi doesn’t follow Haiwen to Taiwan, but instead goes to Hong Kong in 1948 to help her father with his bookstore business. She and her sister are sent there to meet with a publisher, an excuse for her father to get his two daughters to safety in the British colony. Suchi’s sister is a talented seamstress and finds work easily, but Suchi’s only real talent is her voice so she finds work in a somewhat seedy nightclub and ends up marrying one of the local Cantonese patrons.
In the late 1950s when Haiwen is still living in Taiwan, he encounters hostility from locals who view him as a mainland invader.
Although Haiwen wasn’t wearing military fatigues, his lack of Taiwanese, his Shanghainese-accented Mandarin—it all gave him away as a waishengren, someone who came from across the strait. He remembered the brief period he had been sent to Kaohsiung in the south, how he had had a hard time getting served at food stall run by the locals. The nicer ones called him “o’a,” a taro, while many others cursed him as “a’shanti”—mainland pig—under their breath. It was how he learned these words in Taiwanese.
But Haiwen and his KMT brethren don’t want to be in Taiwan in the first place and feel suffocated on the island. They had put faith in Chiang Kai-shek to get them back to the mainland and never imagined their exile would last decades.
For history buffs who are familiar with Old Shanghai and Old Hong Kong, a few of Chen’s smaller details may raise an eyebrow. She writes a number of times that Shanghai’s International Settlement was run by Great Britain. At the time of the story, it was administered by a municipal council with representatives from fourteen countries. In addition, Chen has Suchi and her sister take an overnight train from Shanghai to Shenzhen. From there—at Lowu Station—they embark on a three-hour train ride to Kowloon Station. It seems more likely, since Shenzhen was then an intermediate stop on the Kowloon-Canton railway, that the sleeper would have gone from Shanghai to Guangzhou, and from there a three-hour train ride to the Kowloon terminus. Small details relative to the overall sweep of the story, perhaps, but distracting to readers who know the history.
Our current era is still plagued by refugee crises. Towards the end of the book, Suchi is a grandmother and thinks about what it means to belong somewhere.