Introducing Homeseeking

The Audacious Book Club February selection

Karissa Chen’s 2014 short story “Altar” begins with what seems to be a reunion of long lost lovers: a man spots a woman sitting on a park bench, realizes she is the woman he loves, and approaches her. The man is observant, a chronicler of detail: he notes her “gold-red hair rising in the breeze. Fair skin pale in the early morning light…her legs crossed beneath her skirt, a hint of thigh…the birthmark on her calf. A notebook balanced on her knee. In one hand, a blue ballpoint pen; in the other, the one with the diamond, a pink highlighter.”

He remembers gathering the hair at the nape of her neck, kissing her. He is frustrated that she does not recognize him. But, as he says, “thirty years changes a man.” In Chen’s story, however, all is not as it seems. The woman grows increasingly uncomfortable with the man’s attention; the man’s point of view is in second person, the “you” implicating the reader in both his growing anger and her distress. By the story’s horrific conclusion, we are not certain if the woman does indeed recognize her former lover or if the woman is a stranger and the man has crossed into madness. What we are certain of is his violent response to being abandoned and forgotten.

Homeseeking, Chen’s debut novel, takes the seeds of this horror story about love and loss and germinates something both more forgiving and more complex. In what she calls the Overture, it is 1947, and we meet 16-year-old Suchi, grieving in her bed, worrying that her lover has forgotten her, and Haiwen, who has enlisted in the Nationalist Army, is preparing to deploy to fight in China’s Civil War and who firmly believes that he and Suchi will find their way back to one another. By the second chapter, we are introduced to Suchi and Haiwen again, but it is 2008, and “a chorus of violins” has brought Suchi into his life for a “third and final time.” Over the course of the book, we explore what has happened in the intervening years. We learn about how Suchi and Haiwen both leave their families behind in Shanghai. While those families navigate cultural revolution and the effects of communism, Suchi and Haiwen meet briefly again in the 60s, but they navigate radically different homes and marriages that shape their lives.

Chen is a master at adding both complication and context to her characters: she also takes us back in time to Suchi and Haiwen’s first meeting in 1938 and to a visit to a fortune teller who speaks to them of their mingyun, their personal destinies, and their yuanfen, the predestination that “tether(s them) to each other with string.” It is this thread between the lovers that often carries the book’s emotional weight, but it is Chen’s deft intertwining of history, destiny, family, and home within the Chinese diaspora that gives the narrative propulsion and depth.

Homeseeking is an ambitious, expansive book, an engrossing example of the best kind of historical fiction—the kind that roots us authentically in time and place but also features nuanced, interesting characters whose successes and mistakes are presented with a clear-eyed empathy. I’m excited to discuss this book with you throughout this month and at our book club discussion with Karissa, which will be on February 25 at 8 p.m. You can register for our discussion here.

Have you started Homeseeking yet? What are your early impressions?