Journey from China to america with Haiwen and Suchi, lovers separated by time and one pivotal resolution, from the ’40s to current day. On this excerpt, wander the vividly painted streets of wartime Shanghai with distributors, early risers, and troubled minds, and meet heartbroken Haiwen and Suchi on the cusp of the occasion that can separate them by time and distance till they meet once more 60 years later. Homeseeking by Karissa Chen
An epic and intimate story of 1 couple throughout sixty years as world occasions pull them collectively and aside, illuminating the Chinese language diaspora and exploring what it means to search out house far out of your homeland.
A single alternative can outline a life-time.
Haiwen is shopping for bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he appears up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the primary time in sixty years.
To not too long ago widowed Haiwen it looks like a second likelihood, however Suchi has solely survived by refusing to look again.
Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen of their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, however when Haiwen secretly enlisted within the Nationalist military in 1947 to save lots of his brother from the draft, she was left with simply his violin and a word: Forgive me.
Homeseeking follows the separated lovers by means of six many years of tumultuous Chinese language historical past as struggle, famine, and alternative take them individually to the music halls of Hong Kong, the army encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the current to the previous whereas tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the current, assembly within the crucible of their lives. All through, Haiwen holds his recollections shut whereas Suchi forces herself to look solely ahead, neither dropping sight of the house they maintain of their hearts.
Directly epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a narrative of household, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the facility of affection to endure past distance, past time.
Overture
April 1947
Shanghai
Within the final violet minutes of the disappearing night time, the longtang wakes.
The neighborhood’s acquainted symphony opens with the night-soil man’s arrival: the trundle of his cart on the uneven street, the chime of his bell. With a slurry and a graceful, he empties the latrines left in entrance of uniform doorways and sings a parting chorus. In his wake, stairs and hinges creak; ladies peek out into the alleyway to say their overturned night time stools. Crouching, they clear silt from the picket buckets: bamboo sticks clock, clamshells rattle, water from back-door taps glugs and splatters. By the point they’ve completed, the sugar porridge vendor has emerged, saying her items in repetitive singsong as she pushes her cart. Later, the others will be part of her: the tea egg man, the pear syrup sweet peddler, the vegetable and rice sellers, every with their very own seasoned melodies. However for now, it’s her lone name that drifts by means of the lanes of Sifo Li.
She passes the Zhang household shikumen, the sixth row home alongside this perimeter. Inside, on the second ground, sixteen-year-old Suchi sleeps fitfully after hours of weeping, her slender limbs twisted across the skinny cotton sheet, her sweat seeping into the mattress. She is mired in a nightmare through which Haiwen not acknowledges her. A fragile crust of dried tears rims her lashes.
Subsequent to her is the older Zhang daughter, Sulan, who snuck again house solely an hour earlier. Her pores and skin is sticky with the odor of smoke and alcohol and sweat. She sleeps peacefully, dreaming of dancing in a phenomenal gown of plum taffeta and silk, arm in arm along with her finest pal, Yizhen.
Within the room above, her father, Li’oe, lies sleepless, troubled by uncertainties. He wonders how a lot his stash of fabi has depreciated in a single day, how a lot gold he would possibly purchase off the black market with what foreign money he has left. He weighs the continued price of operating his bookstore, of printing the underground journals—all he takes from his household, to not point out the hazard—and for a second guilt licks on the fringe of his ideas. He regrets now pawning that little ring he bought the day Suchi was born, two delicate twists of gold braided into one, one thing he’d saved for her dowry.
However Sulan had insisted she’d discovered the right secondhand material to make Suchi a qipao for her birthday, and he’d agreed to offer Sulan the cash. Now he thinks solely of how helpful that loop of gold has grow to be.
Beside him, his spouse, Sieu’in, pretends to sleep, pretends to be unaware of her husband’s nervous shifting. She inventories the meals left of their shops—half a cup of rationed gritty pink rice, a handful of dehydrated mushrooms, cabbage she pickled weeks in the past, radish scraps boiled to broth, a single minimize of scallion she has coaxed into regrowth within the spring solar. She will stretch these substances for per week, perhaps per week and a half—she’s going to make a watery but flavorful congee, and when none of that continues to be, she’s going to empty the rice powder from the bag and boil it into milky liquid providing the phantasm of nourishment. After that? She gained’t add to her husband’s worries by asking him for more cash, she decides. She has just a few items of knickknack remaining—the jade bracelet that presses coolly towards her cheek now, as an example. Her mom gave it to her from her personal dowry, and its colour is deep, just like the darkish leaves of the inexperienced greens she so desperately craves.
A ground and a half under, within the pavilion room, Siau Zi, their boarder and worker, is dreaming of the older Zhang daughter. Sulan smiles invitingly, her lips painted pink, her hair permed and clipped. He’s effortlessly charming on this dream; for as soon as he says the correct issues to make her adore him. I can deal with you, he tells her, I’ll be any person on this new China, you’ll see, and he or she sighs into his embrace.
Outdoors Siau Zi’s window, the sky is popping a violent shade of pink. The neighborhood’s music shifts its layers as its inhabitants mud off their desires and rise. Lovers murmur. Coals in stoves crackle. Oil sizzles in a pan, able to fry breakfast. Doorways groan open, steel titties clang towards heavy wooden. A grandma sweeps the bottom in entrance of her shikumen, the broom scratching a staccato beat towards the cobblestone. A toddler cries, seized from sleep.
The porridge vendor continues her route. In useless, she calls out, remembering a time when her items had been beloved by the youngsters of this neighborhood, a time earlier than the wars, when she might afford to make use of white sugar and sticky rice, when including lotus seed hearts and osmanthus syrup was commonplace as an alternative of an incredible luxurious. As she nears the shikumen the place the Wang household lives, she pauses, recalling how the younger son notably delighted in her dessert. She bellows out twice: Badaon tsoh! Badaon tsoh!, deep throated, as passionate as if she had been calling out to a lover—however she is met with the dim stillness of the higher home windows. After a second, she blots her sleeve towards her brow, leans into her cart, and continues on her manner, the echo of her music trailing behind her.
However the Wang family is awake.
Yuping has not slept your complete night time; her eyes are puffy and darkish. She tries to cowl her despair with make-up, however when she catches her reflection within the mirror, the tears resume. Her husband, Chongyi, pretends to not discover. He attire quietly, components his salt-and-pepper hair to at least one facet with a fine-toothed comb, and slicks strays with oil. He thinks to present his son, Haiwen, this comb. It’s carved from ivory and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a frivolous vainness he has held on to in any case these years after they have bought a lot else.
Within the subsequent room, their eleven-year-old daughter, Haijun, rummages by means of her music field, looking for a memento to present her huge brother. Onto the ground, she hurls the paper cutout dolls, the hair ribbons, the pink crepe flower she palmed from a retailer’s ornamental signal. All these so-called treasures and he or she has nothing price giving him. In a fury, she balls herself beneath her blanket, hoping to suffocate within the damp jungle of her breath.
Within the attic room, the eldest son, Haiming, and his pregnant spouse have been up since earlier than daybreak. The room is foul with the stench of bile, Ellen having vomited twice. She doesn’t need to go to the prepare station later, she tells her husband. However Haiming solely appears at her, silent and somber.
Haiwen is first to descend the steps. In his new uniform, his arm pits are already sweating by means of the heavy, unforgiving cloth. He steps outdoors, into the modest courtyard of their shikumen, and appears up on the expanse of sky. The pink is receding, giving approach to a noncommittal blue. In a number of minutes, nothing of that good colour will stay, solely a veil of skinny cloud, like a layer of soy milk pores and skin.
He listens to the longtang’s symphony, this consolation he has grown up with. He closes his eyes and sees all of it, not a symphony however a film, yet another vibrant than any he’s attended on the cinema: The cobblestone alleys filled with wares and possessions. The neighborhood youngsters, laughing as they chase each other. The barber they practically knock over, Yu yasoh, and his consumer, Lau Die, whose crown is sparse however beard is full. The close by breakfast stall opened every day by Zia yasoh, and the rickshaw driver who sits slurping a bowl of soy milk on a low stool. The second-story window that opens so Mo ayi can name to a passing vendor, who stops as she lowers a basket with just a few cash in change for 3 shriveled loquats. Loh konkon and Zen konkon in the course of all of it, the 2 males oblivious to the encompassing hubbub as they mull over their every day sport of xiangqi, a ritual that continues uninterrupted as it will on another day.
However it’s not another day.
Haiwen opens his eyes.
Right now is the day he’s leaving.
In one other two hours he will probably be on the prepare with the opposite enlistees, a bulging backpack pressed towards his stomach, {a photograph} of Suchi towards his breast, a tremble in his coronary heart, waving on the receding picture of his household. The longtang of his childhood, Sifo Li, will probably be behind him; Fourth Highway, with its bustling teahouses and calligraphy shops, will probably be behind him; quickly, Shanghai, too, will probably be behind him. For years afterward, he’ll riffle by means of his recollections of this place he considers house, layering them on high of each other like stacks of rice paper, making an attempt to recollect what was when and by no means fairly seeing the total image.
For now, Haiwen closes his eyes once more. His thoughts traces the alleyways he is aware of so properly, the well-trod path between his home and Suchi’s, cobblestones upon which he’ll stroll one final time within the coming minutes: The four-house expanse between his shikumen and the primary predominant lane on their left. The best flip down the lane that intersects with the one which heads towards the west gate. One other left, one other predominant artery. The straight lengthy distance towards the south gate’s guojielou, the flip proper earlier than the arched exit. The 5 plain again doorways till the painted bunny comes into view, its flaked white define wringing a pang in Haiwen’s chest. He’ll go away his violin right here: he sees himself setting it down, laying it towards the chippedpaint as tenderly as he imagines a mom abandons a beloved child.
He is aware of he’ll lookup on the second- ground window. Suchi’s window. Its imaginative and prescient dredges an insufferable loneliness in him.
He squeezes his eyes tighter, tries more durable, and what comes subsequent is unattainable: He’s peering by means of her window, gazing upon her as she sleeps. In one other second, he has prised open the panels and is inside her room. She is dreaming, she is speaking to him in her sleep. He locations a palm towards her cheek, strokes a thumb throughout the mushy velvet of her pores and skin. He takes within the fringe of her lashes, the bud of her mouth. A mouth he needs he had remembered to kiss one remaining time. He desires to recollect each pore, each stray hair, desires to emblazon her into his reminiscence, at the same time as he’s sure he’ll all the time know her, that even when he’s an previous man by the point he returns to her, even when she has aged and adjusted, he’ll know her. He brushes the hair sticky on her parted lips, his fingers lingering on the heat of her breath. He’s sorry for what he’s about to do, what he has achieved; he won’t ever cease being sorry.
Her nightmares have turned candy. Suchi can odor bitter plums on the horizon. Is it already so late in spring? she murmurs. Later, she’s going to wake and keep in mind yesterday’s careless phrases; she’s going to lose half a lifetime to remorse. However for now: she will really feel the nice and cozy heft of Haiwen’s presence encircling hers, the tender contact of his hand cupping her face, and he or she believes he has forgiven her. Her physique unclenches. Proper earlier than a deep, untroubled sleep claims her, she hears his voice in her ear, variety, reassuring. Quickly, he guarantees her, the plum rains are nearly right here.
Excerpted from HOMESEEKING by Karissa Chen with permission from Putnam, an imprint of The Penguin Group, a division of Penguin Random Home, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Karissa Chen