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.
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“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.
Karissa Chen in conversation with Esther Tseng
When: 7 p.m., Jan. 9
Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles
Information: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-karissa-chen-presents-homeseeking-w-esther-tseng