In Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1945, Wang Haiwen and Zhang Suchi sneak out of their homes to a local fortune teller, who informs them they have strong “yoefen” – “you’ll find yourselves pulled toward each other again and again … like you’re tethered to each other with string”. The pair are both 14, childhood friends who have barely registered they are in love and too self-conscious to tell the other.
Soon after, they begin an innocent and short-lived romance, before Haiwen disappears without warning. He enlisted in the Nationalist army in place of his older brother to prove his father’s loyalty to the Republic.
Spanning the years between 1938 and 2008 across Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New York and California, Karissa Chen’s debut novel is a sprawling yet intimate epic chronicling the lives of two people growing up and trying to build stable lives in the wake of the Chinese Civil War. Alternate points of view reveal their lives as the two experience hope, loss, desire and pain.
For the most part, Suchi’s perspective unfolds chronologically, reflecting a survival instinct to keep looking forward for fear of being burdened by the past. Haiwen’s story works backwards, as he desperately grasps behind him for a familiar anchor that has escaped. Like the predestined string that binds them, the effect is two narrative threads reaching out, feeling into space and trying to converge into a whole again.
Despite Suchi and Haiwen’s natural kinship, external pressures continually threaten their fate. Suchi is a naturally gifted student. Her proud and politically conscious father drills into her the importance of education and free-thinking, all the while knowing the economic upheaval means he cannot afford to send his kids to university. Meanwhile, Haiwen, a virtuoso violinist, comes from money. His parents in the face of mass poverty still choose to pour money into expensive Western educations for their kids.
Just as the young lovers are learning to nurture their new relationship, they brush up against heavy expectations of familial piety and patriotism, issues of class, conflicting ideologies and oppressive power structures neither can fully understand, much less control.
One of the most striking features of the book is the multiplicity of languages. Chen brings to life a symphony of dialects to create intimacy as well as the dissonance of the diaspora, proving Chinese is not an easily digestible monolith culture. While Mandarin is enforced as the national language, Haiwen and Suchi feel most comfortable sharing secrets and nicknames in their native Shanghainese. When circumstances drive them out of the mainland, they are confronted with local racism, forced to adopt Cantonese, Taiwanese and English with unwieldy tongues, and to accept corruptions of their given names where they’re displaced – Haeven/Haiwen becomes Howard, and Suji/Suchi becomes Soukei then Sue.
With one exception, the next time Haiwen and Suchi see each other is six decades later at a grocery store in Los Angeles. Neither have had the lives they anticipated, but the two have nevertheless managed to carve happiness out of the ones they’ve led. Although the shadow of what they shared – always tender, always understanding – lingers, the intervening time has made it impossible for them to reclaim what they once had.
The tragic irony of their mutual wish to have married each other, started a family and grow old together is so simple, but it is a dream that would only have been possible if their reality did not exist. Each has suffered too much alone, and each longs to be reunited with a nuclear family that has since vanished.
Homeseeking challenges its characters to continue shaping their destinies when they feel most powerless. In the absence of a physical sense of belonging, Haiwen and Suchi are asked to evaluate what capacity they still have to hold space for each other, and to consider what comfort can be offered when home is no longer a place.
Homeseeking, by Karissa Chen (Hachette, $37.99), is out now.
