Homeseeking

Homeseeking is a novel by the American writer Karissa Chen, published in 2025. It is her first novel.

Haiwen and Suchi met as children in a Shanghai neighbourhood, where she heard him practising the violin, and their friendship turned into something more. In 1947 Haiwen enlisted in the Nationalist army to keep his brother out of the draft, leaving her a violin and a note asking for forgiveness, and the two of them did not see each other again. The novel follows them separately through six decades of Chinese history, through the war and the famine, to Hong Kong, Taiwan, New York and California, telling Haiwen's story backwards from the supermarket and Suchi's forwards from her childhood. Chen has said the book came out of her own family's history of separation, and the structure keeps the two of them apart for almost the whole novel so that the reader knows what neither of them does.

The title refers to the search for a place to settle that neither character can finish, and the novel's two timelines meet in the present, at the point where Haiwen speaks to her again.