Homeseeking

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death. 

In Homeseeking, the protagonists, Haiwen and Suchi, are displaced from their childhood homes in Shanghai and forced to live elsewhere. Throughout the novel, they struggle with their longing for home even as they create new homes for themselves in new places. The novel’s title, Homecoming, itself refers to this theme. It comes from a translation of a poem called “Homecoming” or “Returning Home” by early medieval Chinese poet He Zhizhang, which Haiwen quotes to describe his feeling of being “a stranger in [his] own hometown” when he returns to visit Shanghai after being away for so many years (78).

As children, Suchi feels entirely at home in the longtang, or neighborhood, in Shanghai where she lives. She shows her familiarity and comfort there in an early scene when she explores the neighborhood on her own before she starts school. Haiwen was born in Hong Kong, but he also quickly adapts to the neighborhood. Before Haiwen departs to join the military, he pauses to take in the familiar sights of the neighborhood, such as “the well-trod path between his house and Suchi’s” (5). He carries these images with him when he leaves and dedicates himself to remembering them. Suchi is not so fortunate; she does not realize when her parents put her on a train that it will be the last time she sees her childhood home.

Suchi makes her home in Hong Kong. She learns Cantonese, becomes friendly with other residents, and eventually gets married and raises a child there. She does allow herself to think about her memories of Shanghai when she is singing, as “every night she st[ands] onstage and conjure[s] up her loved ones’ ghosts and will[s] them to hear her” (318). It takes Haiwen a longer time to adapt to his new circumstances. He remains fixated on his memories of home and his desire to return there. He struggles to find a sense of belonging in Taiwan and later in Los Angeles. In Taiwan, he is isolated because of his prejudice against the nationalist military there and the language barrier between Mandarin and Taiwanese. In Los Angeles, he struggles to maintain relationships without the support of his wife who “organize[s] their social calendar” (14). While he eventually resolves to appreciate what he has, a wife and children, he still longs for the home he once knew.

The novel emphasizes the idea that home is not a place but rather a feeling. When Haiwen returns to Shanghai after so many years, he is struck by how different it is. He thinks to himself, “Was Shanghai still home? Or was home now California, an ocean away?” (211). This shows that at this moment, Haiwen is questioning the concept of home he had held onto for so long: as a geographical location rather than relationships. Suchi comes to a similar realization at the end of the novel when she is flying to Shanghai to visit her mother in a care home: “Suchi knew now that home wasn’t a place. […] It was people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared” (480).

When Suchi and Haiwen reestablish their relationship at the end of Homeseeking, they are on an airplane, between Los Angeles and Shanghai. They are effectively, geographically, nowhere, yet they are at home because they are together. This underscores the novel’s final message that home and belonging are about relationships, not places.