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• Homeseeking G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York, NY), 2025

1. Homeseeking LCCN 2023051942 Type of material Book Personal name Chen, Karissa, author. Main title Homeseeking / Karissa Chen. Published/Produced New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025. Projected pub date 2501 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780593713006 (ebook) (hardcover)

• Karissa Chen website - https://www.karissachen.com/

  Karissa Chen is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as multiple writing residencies including at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan.

  ​

  She is represented by Michelle Brower at Trellis Literary Management.

• The Rumpus - https://therumpus.net/2025/01/08/the-first-book-karissa-chen/

  The First Book: Karissa Chen
  Karissa ChenJanuary 8, 2025

  The Author: Karissa Chen
  The Book: Homeseeking (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2025)
  The Elevator Pitch: Childhood best friends journey back to each other after sixty years apart as star-crossed soulmates.

  ***

  HOMESEEKING cover image
  The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?

  Karissa Chen: I had long been researching the stories of people who had fled to Taiwan from China after the Chinese Civil War, but I was never sure how to frame the story, how best to tell these stories. I’d started to tell some of these stories through short stories, and tried another totally different novel, but it didn’t stick.

  Then, one day, I was talking to a good friend of mine, a guy I once had a crush on in my early teens, who’d also had a crush on me—oh, high school! Because of various factors, we never ended up dating, and there had been a short period of time in our early twenties where we had wondered what would have happened if we had. It was always in the back of my mind if, given the right timing, something could have happened between us, except one of us was always in a relationship. Anyway, he and I were catching up one evening after several months of not talking, and it was a great conversation that triggered that old question of “What if?” in my head. Except, because I was waist-deep in this research, my next thought became, “What if it hadn’t been silly high school reasons that kept us apart but an entire war?” I’d been finding this to be a common story in my research, how soldiers unwittingly left wives and fiancées and entire families behind. I’m a sucker for a missed connection/will-they-won’t-they story, so I got really caught up in the writing almost immediately.

  The friend and I are each now happily married to other people by the way, before anyone asks!

  Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?

  Chen: If I count the years of focused research I did before setting pen to paper, it’s been over a decade—and I actually first started doing some casual research into this history as early as 2011. But I actively started writing this specific book in early 2017, and we finished editing in late 2023—wherein I wrote totally new material!—so I guess the actual writing took me almost seven years.

  Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?

  Chen: Ha, no. I have at least one failed manuscript sitting in a folder on my hard drive and several other halfway written novels that I tell myself I will get back to someday. What set this book apart is that I cared enough about it to really see it through—I finally had the stamina that writing a novel required. That, combined with the fact that I wrote my earlier manuscripts when I was a less experienced writer. I don’t think I was able to craft a successful novel at that point yet. That being said, I’m terrified of having to try to write the next book, since I’m sure I’ll have to relearn how to write a novel all over again.

  Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?

  Chen: I’m super lucky in that my amazing agent, Michelle Brower, knew exactly which editors to approach with my book, and my fabulous editor, Tara Singh Carlson, offered on my book right away. I am forever indebted to both of them for believing in my book so wholeheartedly from the very beginning.

  Rumpus: Which authors/writers buoyed you along the way? How?

  Chen: I’m uncertain if this question is about specific writers in my life that acted as cheerleaders or writing that I read that helped me move forward with my writing. Since I have written extensively about the former in my acknowledgements, I’ll answer the latter:

  Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts made me cry towards the end of my self-editing process. I was finding it so difficult to edit the book to a point where I felt it was ready to send to agents, and I really wanted to give up because I was so tired of looking at the book. But he has this section in the book where he gives the reader/writer a pep talk, and it was exactly what I needed to push through and finish my revisions.

  Also, whenever I needed inspiration to keep writing when I was feeling like my book was a dead, lifeless thing, I flipped through Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Eileen Chang’s Half a Lifelong Romance, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, and Cathy Chung’s The Tenth Muse. Those books really put me in the right frame of mind to both want to write, and to write this particular book.

  Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?

  Chen: To begin with, I initially thought this was going to be a short story! But I kept writing and when I hit page fifty, I thought to myself, “Oh this is gonna be a novella, maybe!” But then the story kept going, and at 100 pages I knew I was in trouble. That was also when I wrote the first “Suchi” chapter that takes place in the past—up until that moment I had only written present day chapters from Haiwen’s point of view.

  I also did not know the structure of the book up front! I was writing chapters out of order, and even had one chapter written from both points of view, and I had no idea what I was doing. I’m someone who craves structure though and having no sense of what I was doing or where I was going with the book eventually made me stall out, and for several months, I couldn’t move forward—nothing I wrote worked. It was only when, one day, listening to the cast album of the musical “The Last Five Years”—a musical about two people getting a divorce where one character’s journey goes backwards from the divorce to the beginning of their relationship, and the other goes from their first date to the end—that it clicked for me that this was the structure I was looking for. Once I found that structure, all the other pieces started to fall in place.

  Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?

  Chen: I’ve been honored to have had fiction and nonfiction published in a bunch of places, including Catapult (RIP), Gulf Coast, Guernica, The Cut, Electric Lit, Longreads, and many others. And of course, The Rumpus!

  Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?

  Chen: That it’s a persistence game. “If you keep knocking, one day someone will open a door.” I know I’m not the most talented writer in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I also knew I would keep working at becoming a better writer and keep trying to get published, for as long as it took. Despite the many periods of self-doubt I had, the stretches where I felt I would never write anything good again—I would always eventually return to my desk, because I wouldn’t let myself give up.

  Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?

  Chen: I used to say that I was writing for a younger version of myself, as a shorthand to say that I was trying to write for someone like me—a Chinese Taiwanese American who craved an understanding of their history, who wanted to see themselves and their family reflected in literature. Now that I have a kid, this feels less theoretical now—I literally am writing so that my child grows up surrounded by greater representation of his identity, culture, and history.

  I’m a bit embarrassed to say it took me a while to really get clarity on this—for a long time I didn’t really feel comfortable with owning my identity as an Asian American writer, and for some reason, when I was younger, it never even occurred to me that I could write for an Asian American community. There are a lot of folks I can thank for helping me evolve in this way, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t specifically give a shoutout to the Kundiman community. Not only did attending my first Kundiman retreat help me give myself permission to write about my family’s history and experiences, it also made a big difference to be able to sit in a room full of other Asian American writers and feel like, “Oh, this is the audience I’m writing for.”

  Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?

  Chen: To be honest, almost all of it is surprising! There was so little I knew about the actual process of getting a book published once it was out of my hands. So almost everything—from the long timeline it takes for a book to get from sale to pub date, the number of times multiple copyeditors will read your book, the things that go into marketing and publicity and selling a book, the fact that “Shelf Awareness” is actually the name of a trade publication and not a punny name for a book app (yes, this is what I actually thought), the way sub rights work and what goes into consideration for different markets—these things have all been surprises.

  But perhaps maybe something that is most… striking, if not surprising, is how many people it takes to get a book out into the world and into the right readers’ hands. Of course, I knew that, but seeing the work that goes into it firsthand is something else! As a writer, you spend years alone, trying to make sense of this world you’ve built, and it is almost like this quiet, sacred space. Then you sell your book and all of a sudden, it’s not a solitary thing anymore; all these real-world considerations come into play and all of these other people are involved. I am extremely grateful to these many people (often chronically overworked and underpaid!) for all they are doing to shepherd my book baby into this world.

  ***

  Author photograph courtesy of Karissa Chen

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  Karissa Chen
  Karissa Chen is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as residences at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts; the Ragdale Foundation; and Willapa Bay AiR. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan.

• Los Angeles Daily News - https://www.dailynews.com/2025/01/07/how-homeseeking-author-karissa-chen-navigates-history-regret-and-pizza/

  How ‘Homeseeking’ author Karissa Chen navigates history, regret and pizza
  The poignant debut novel takes the reader on a journey that spans from Shanghai in 1938 to 2008-era Los Angeles.
  Karissa Chen discusses “Homeseeking,” her debut novel. (Photo by Ernie Chang / Courtesy of Putnam)
  Karissa Chen discusses “Homeseeking,” her debut novel. (Photo by Ernie Chang / Courtesy of Putnam)
  Author
  By Stuart Miller | smiller@journalist.com
  UPDATED: January 8, 2025 at 3:40 PM PST

  A man named Howard is in a Ranch Market in Los Angeles in 2008 when he sees a face he’s never forgotten.

  The old woman examining the melons is now known as Sue, but 70 years earlier in Shanghai, she was Suchi and Howard was known as Haiwen. They were best friends. In their teens, that friendship blossomed into true love but their lives – already shaped by Japan’s invasion of China and then World War II – were forever altered by the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists. It has been decades since they’ve laid eyes on each other, as each tried carving out a new life abroad in Hong Kong or Taiwan and then in America.

  SEE ALSO: Like books? Get our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more

  “Homeseeking,” the beautiful and poignant debut novel by Karissa Chen, is both broad in its historic scope and intimate in following Haiwen, Suchi and their families as outside forces continually change their paths. Chen, 42, takes the reader forward in time from 1938 with Suchi’s story while looking back in time from 2008 for Howard’s journey. She spoke recently by video about writing the novel and how her life influenced her writing. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

  Q. Haiwen is stuck, always examining the past and imagining other possibilities while Suchi relentlessly moves forward. Did that dictate your structure or was it shaped by the book’s structure?

  I wanted to juxtapose the different ways in which people deal with trauma. Some people just want to forget the past and look forward but some constantly reexamine it and think about what they could have done differently.

  I came across the structure when I was stuck; I had written different parts but they weren’t written consecutively, and I had no idea how to make it work. Then I was listening to Jason Robert Brown’s musical “The Last Five Years,” about a couple that opens with the woman singing about the end of their marriage and then the man sings about their first date. They alternate until they meet in the middle on their wedding day.

  I realized that idea totally works with the themes of the book and represents these characters’ journeys. The constraints made me pick pivotal moments in history or in their lives. Without that, there’d have been a temptation to go over every single detail of their lives. I was forced to think about what was truly life-changing.

  Q. Are you more likely to look back or determined to move ahead?

  Haiwen becomes paralyzed by indecision. He made a difficult choice and lost Suchi but his life turned out better in some ways than if he had stayed. I was very conscious of wanting his life’s journey to not be clear-cut. Suchi says if you regret the past, you wipe away the life you led, which for Haiwen includes his wife and children.

  That’s something that I think about for myself. But I am a nostalgic person and do tend to look back. Right now, I’m pretty happy with my life but the idea of looking back with regret was always one of my biggest fears, even as a child. I was so terrified of making the wrong decision that I became very indecisive.

  Q, How did you balance their intimate relationship with the vast scope of history that buffeted their lives?

  I was very conscious of not wanting the novel to be a history book, where you can see all the research someone has done on the page. To me, history is filled with these intimate moments where you see the impact on an individual scale. You can tell me two million people fled from China to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War but what captivates me is reading about this little boy sent away by his mother to keep him safe from the Communists: he was eating a pomegranate on the cart and didn’t see his mom waving goodbye and could never eat pomegranates again because of that. That captures the heartbreak and makes those two million people come alive to me.

  So I wanted people to understand how this history impacts people’s lives on these granular levels.

  Q. You provide plenty of historical context but I still ended up reading online about events like the Battle of Shanghai to learn more.

  If someone is just content to just live in the world of the book then hopefully I do a good enough job that they enjoy it. I won’t say, “You didn’t do your homework.”

  But I’m the kind of person who leaves a movie and Wikipedias everything. If I’m invested in the world, I want to know more. I hopefully inspire readers to do that; one reason for writing this is because this history isn’t known. I didn’t learn about it in school; it’s my heritage and I had to go and do the research myself.

  Q. Do you worry about caring too much for your characters? There’s one brief moment where Haiwen and Suchi reunite after years apart. Were you tempted to give them more of a chance?

  In grad school, a teacher said to me, “You need to stop feeling so bad for your characters and you need to let them also suffer the consequences of their actions.”

  That stuck with me. I care too much about them and think of them as real people but now I don’t protect them. There was no way that they could be together. It wasn’t right for where they were in their lives because they had obligations to other people.

  When I was just starting, a guy friend said, “You have them pine for each other their whole lives and you don’t even let them consummate their love?” So I let them have one moment together.

  Q. You had split your time between New Jersey and Taiwan. How did that shape you?

  It was whiplash. I would come back to the States and feel great here – this is where I grew up and it feels like home. I missed Target and New York pizza.

  Then I would go back to Taiwan and think, “Why would I ever leave this place?” There is a part of me that is really not known in the States – the part that grew up on Chinese dramas and eats certain foods. Growing up in America, that was very strange to other people, and I felt I had to hide it, which left me unmoored at times.

  I felt split in half then and I still do because I don’t know which part of me is more important to hold onto and to nourish. No matter where I go, I miss somewhere else but I also find something wonderful that makes me feel like I belong. I think that is just the state of being when you are a hyphenated person with multiple cultures in you.

  For the book, I could understand to a degree what it feels like to search for a feeling of home somewhere and to figure out what that means. The characters are dealing with it to a much bigger degree.

  Also, moving to Taiwan really helped me understand a bit of what it’s like to be an immigrant. I speak the language but not well and when I first moved I was using the wrong words and unable to read signs and people laughed at me. And that’s in a place where you can still use English to get by so imagine what it was be like for Haiwen and Suchi who were forced by circumstances to start over and then do it again.

  Now that I have a toddler I only come back to the States twice a year and Taiwan definitely feels much more like my homebase. When I’m back now, I’m more conscious that the stay is temporary.

  Q. So you have to eat as much pizza as possible.

  Ha, yes. I actually just had some pizza right before this interview.

While Karissa Chen's sweeping epic, "Homeseeking," centers on war, love and family, more than anything it's about the immigrant's phantom limb - the longing for home and for the lives and loves left behind.

The book uses a wide lens, showing the upheaval of the Chinese Civil War, the tumult of the Cultural Revolution and the dissonance of immigration, while never taking the focus off the two lovers at the center of the story: Suchi and Haiwen, who meet as kindergartners and fall in love in their teenage years, as civil war rages. They suddenly lose each other when Haiwen secretly decides to enlist in the Nationalist army - a decision intended to help his family but that comes with lasting, unexpected repercussions. It is not until 2008 that Suchi and Haiwen reconnect in Los Angeles, where Suchi has moved to help raise her grandchildren and where Haiwen has recently become a lonely widower.

The novel follows the two in the intervening six decades as they separately make their way in the world, relocating across Shanghai, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States. The chapters alternate perspectives as well as timelines: Suchi's account is told chronologically, beginning with the pair's first meeting, while Haiwen's moves backward beginning with their reunion in 2008. This daring choice is fitting, given that the years harden Suchi, who refuses to look back, while they soften Haiwen, whose memories bring him a semblance of companionship and home.

As the characters evolve and relocate, their names change, too. Suchi and her sister dodge the Cultural Revolution by moving to Hong Kong, but dire circumstances push Suchi to find work at a seedy nightclub, where she meets a wealthy but abusive man whom she has little choice but to marry. Her husband is so controlling that he dictates her language and her name, changing Suchi to Soukei to reflect the Cantonese pronunciation. Similarly, when Haiwen moves to California, he takes the name Howard in service of assimilation. "Easier for the Americans to pronounce," he explains, to which Suchi responds, "Not so easy for a Chinese person to pronounce."

In Soukei, we see the more fearful, timid sides of a once-bold Suchi. And in Howard, we see a split in Haiwen: the new self who has found joy and love with a wife in America, the old self who is still very much in love with Suchi, and - memorably, hauntingly - the in-between self who is racked with bittersweet grief when he returns to Shanghai and learns what remains of his family of origin. Chen wisely uses these shifts in identity to mimic the process of aging, of becoming traumatized and worn down by life, of healing and rediscovering joy. The Suchi and Haiwen we first meet become more dimensional, and even as they change names and develop new traits, the pair feels very much like the same people who met and fell in love as kids. Just as Chen's prose in English seamlessly navigates between Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese and Taiwanese, so too do the iterations of her protagonists naturally blend to inform the constancy in their sense of self.

The ambition and scope of "Homeseeking" are impressive enough before considering Chen's craft and execution. It is impossible not to marvel at the many strands she has woven into this beating heart of a novel. Chen takes a risk in reversing the chronology of Haiwen's narrative and opening with the pair's reconnection in California. One might think that this creates spoilers about the central relationship in the book, but as we revel in the love and laughter Haiwen and Suchi still share six decades later, we are propelled forward by the mystery of what happened to change them into their 2008 selves, and what became of the families who informed their childhood and budding love.

There are moments when Chen's messaging comes off a little heavy-handed, bordering on polemical, but when she takes aim at central emotional truths, which she does for most of "Homeseeking," her storytelling is masterful.

It is rare that a 500-page book delivers on its weight, and even rarer that a book I'm asked to review becomes an all-time favorite. But as I tearfully turned the last page of "Homeseeking," I knew that it had earned a place on my top shelf. For Chen has finally put into words the lifelong grief I have carried as an immigrant - grief for a childhood, a place, a home that no longer exist. As Suchi observes: "Home wasn't a place. It wasn't moments that could be pinned down. It was people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared. People who knew you, saw you, loved you. When those people were far-flung, your home was too. And when those people were gone, home lived on inside you."

What Suchi doesn't say is that home can also live on inside a book. Just as I did, many readers are bound to find their home within the pages of Chen's unforgettable debut.

- - -

Qian Julie Wang is the author of the memoir "Beautiful Country" and an attorney in New York.

- - -

Homeseeking

By Karissa Chen

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Wang, Qian Julie. "'Homeseeking' is a sweeping epic about love, war and displacement." Washington Post, 10 Jan. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A823085727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3702a383. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.

Homeseeking

Karissa Chen. Putnam, $30 (512p) ISBN 978-0-593-71299-3

Chen's sweeping and heart-rending debut brings to life more than 60 years of Chinese history through the tale of childhood sweethearts separated by war and reunited decades later in America. Haiwen, a recent widower, and Suchi, who helps raise her grandkids, cross paths while shopping in 2008 Los Angeles. The two first met as kindergartners in 1930s Shanghai and fell in love as teenagers but were separated by the war between Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists. In the historical timeline, Haiwen enlists in the Nationalist army in a misguided effort to help his family, a decision that will tragically reverberate through succeeding generations. Suchi, meanwhile, is sent to Hong Kong with her older sister to escape the war. At times, Chen relies too much on expositional dialogue to capture historical nuances, such as mainlander suppression of native Taiwanese culture, but in tracing Haiwen's and Suchi's diverging paths, she conveys the breadth of their sacrifices, making their eventual reunion all the more poignant. As she writes about Suchi's realizations: "Home wasn't a place.... It was people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, of places long disappeared." For the most part, Chen scales the heights of her ambition. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management. (Jan.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Homeseeking." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 41, 28 Oct. 2024, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815443599/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df9b0e6f. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.

Chen, Karissa HOMESEEKING Putnam (Fiction None) $30.00 1, 7 ISBN: 9780593712993

Major political, military, and economic events in 20th-century China affect the lives and romance of two Shanghainese over many decades.

By moving around in time and place--including Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S. from 1938 to 2008--Chen illuminates the parallels and relationships among key moments in China's recent history. Intertwining the macro and micro, she makes readers care deeply about the impact of history on her characters' very private lives. Even the characters' names change to denote their code-switching based on geography and situation. Star-crossed lovers Suchi and Haiwen meet as first graders in pre-WWII Japanese-occupied Shanghai. A family crisis caused by Shanghai's shifting politics forces Haiwen to enlist in the Nationalist Army in 1947, before he can propose to Suchi. After Mao's defeat of Chiang Kai-shek, Suchi lands in Hong Kong, and Haiwen in Taiwan; they meet briefly in the 1960s and do not communicate again until they cross paths in 2008 Los Angeles. Though they follow different paths and marry other people, they remain emotionally "tethered to each other," as predicted in 1945 by a fortune teller who also described the concept of "mingyun"--a person's "personal destiny" as determined by a combination of their intrinsic nature and chosen actions--which is so important to the story. Chen avoids romanticizing or demonizing any of her characters. Nuances of class and ethnicity, as well as political identity, come to life as she digs into crevices of ambivalence and muddled motivation. Suchi marries out of financial desperation. Haiwen abandons his passion for the violin to fight for a cause he knows is lost. Suchi's father, a bookstore owner with progressive ideals, finds himself disillusioned once the Communists he backs take over. Haiwen's cosmopolitan, Anglophile parents are vilified by both Nationalists and Communists. This is historical fiction at its most effective.

Romantic lyricism and hard-edged realism merge in this compelling novel.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Chen, Karissa: HOMESEEKING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=833472c7. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.

By Karissa Chen

Zhang Suchi and Wang Haiwen, the protagonists of Karissa Chen's epic debut novel, Homeseeking (Putnam, $30, 9780593712993), have a star-crossed romance that waxes and wanes over decades and continents. Suchi and Haiwen's story begins when they are children in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the 1930s; their relationship blossoms into romance in their teens, but is abruptly interrupted in 1947 when Haiwen enlists in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army. Suchi and her older sister are then sent to Hong Kong to escape the civil war, in which Mao Zedong's Communists ultimately prevail. Separated by conflicts both internal and external, Suchi and Haiwen sacrifice their youthful dreams to build parallel, albeit occasionally intersecting, lives.

Homeseeking is primarily a love story, set against some of the most monumental events of modern Asian history. Its narrative hopscotches back and forth across seven decades, until the estranged sweethearts rekindle their relationship in the unlikely locale of a 99 Ranch Market produce section in Los Angeles. But it's also a political story, tracing the diaspora of post-World War II mainland Chinese who never expected to wind up in Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or America. Finally, it's a family story, of the ever-present yearning for "people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared."

Over a decade in the making, Homeseeking embodies the ambitious scope of James Michener's historical novels or (while not nearly as long) Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. Chen's ability to navigate effortlessly across cultures and eras reflects not only the depth of her research, but also her natural gifts as a storyteller.

There is one potential stumbling block for a more casual reader: Chen transliterates Chinese words differently under different circumstances. For instance, the character Suchi is also referred to as Suji at different points in the narrative. Chen addresses this in a forward, explaining that her choices reflect different regional pronunciations and romanization styles, and asking readers to empathize with the linguistic challenges her characters, and immigrants across the globe, must navigate. While it may take a few detours to Google to clarify the occasional word or phrase, the book settles into a compelling narrative that fills in most of the blanks contextually. It's a small price to pay for admittance to such an auspicious debut.

--Thane Tierney

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 BookPage
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Tierney, Thane. "Homeseeking." BookPage, Jan. 2025, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819405880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=43386ba4. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.

Wang, Qian Julie. "'Homeseeking' is a sweeping epic about love, war and displacement." Washington Post, 10 Jan. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A823085727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3702a383. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025. "Homeseeking." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 41, 28 Oct. 2024, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815443599/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df9b0e6f. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025. "Chen, Karissa: HOMESEEKING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=833472c7. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025. Tierney, Thane. "Homeseeking." BookPage, Jan. 2025, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819405880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=43386ba4. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.

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