Verwandte Artikel zu Homeseeking: A GMA Book Club Pick

Homeseeking: A GMA Book Club Pick - Hardcover

Chen, Karissa

 
9780593712993: Homeseeking: A GMA Book Club Pick
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593712994 ISBN 13: 9780593712993
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK

“Homeseeking is about the love of home and family, even against unimaginable circumstances…[A] sweeping epic.” —Good Housekeeping

“Fans of historical fiction will want to pick up this exceptional novel immediately.” —Los Angeles Times

From WWII to 2008, this deeply moving story follows one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Overture

April 1947

Shanghai

In the last violet minutes of the disappearing night, the longtang wakes.

The neighborhood's familiar symphony opens with the night-soil man's arrival: the trundle of his cart on the uneven road, the chime of his bell. With a slurry and a swish, he empties the latrines left in front of uniform doors and sings a parting refrain. In his wake, stairs and hinges creak; women peek out into the alleyway to claim their overturned night stools. Crouching, they clean silt from the wooden buckets: bamboo sticks clock, clamshells rattle, water from back-door faucets glugs and splatters. By the time they have finished, the sugar porridge vendor has emerged, announcing her goods in repetitive singsong as she pushes her cart. Later, the others will join her: the tea egg man, the pear syrup candy peddler, the vegetable and rice sellers, each with their own seasoned melodies. But for now, it is her lone call that drifts through the lanes of Sifo Li.

She passes the Zhang family shikumen, the sixth row house along this perimeter. Inside, on the second floor, sixteen-year-old Suchi sleeps fitfully after hours of weeping, her slender limbs twisted around the thin cotton sheet, her sweat seeping into the mattress. She is mired in a nightmare in which Haiwen no longer recognizes her. A delicate crust of dried tears rims her lashes.

Next to her is the older Zhang daughter, Sulan, who snuck back home only an hour earlier. Her skin is sticky with the smell of smoke and alcohol and sweat. She sleeps peacefully, dreaming of dancing in a beautiful dress of plum taffeta and silk, arm in arm with her best friend, Yizhen.

In the room above, her father, Li'oe, lies sleepless, troubled by uncertainties. He wonders how much his stash of fabi has depreciated overnight, how much gold he might buy off the black market with what currency he has left. He weighs the continued cost of running his bookstore, of printing the underground journals-all he is taking from his family, not to mention the danger-and for a moment guilt licks at the edge of his thoughts. He regrets now pawning that little ring he purchased the day Suchi was born, two delicate twists of gold braided into one, something he'd saved for her dowry. But Sulan had insisted she'd found the perfect secondhand cloth to make Suchi a qipao for her birthday, and he'd agreed to give Sulan the money. Now he thinks only of how valuable that loop of gold has become.

Beside him, his wife, Sieu'in, pretends to sleep, pretends to be unaware of her husband's nervous shifting. She inventories the food left in their stores-half a cup of rationed gritty red rice, a handful of dehydrated mushrooms, cabbage she pickled weeks ago, radish scraps boiled to broth, a single cut of scallion she has coaxed into regrowth in the spring sun. She can stretch these ingredients for a week, maybe a week and a half-she will make a watery yet flavorful congee, and when none of that remains, she will empty the rice powder from the bag and boil it into milky liquid offering the illusion of nourishment. After that? She won't add to her husband's worries by asking him for more money, she decides. She has a few pieces of jewelry remaining-the jade bracelet that presses coolly against her cheek now, for instance. Her mother gave it to her from her own dowry, and its color is deep, like the dark leaves of the green vegetables she so desperately craves.

A floor and a half below, in the pavilion room, Siau Zi, their boarder and employee, is dreaming of the older Zhang daughter. Sulan smiles invitingly, her lips painted red, her hair permed and clipped. He is effortlessly charming in this dream; for once he says the right things to make her adore him. I can take care of you, he tells her, I'll be somebody in this new China, you'll see, and she sighs into his embrace.

Outside Siau Zi's window, the sky is turning a violent shade of pink. The neighborhood's song shifts its layers as its inhabitants dust off their dreams and rise. Lovers murmur. Coals in stoves crackle. Oil sizzles in a pan, ready to fry breakfast. Doors groan open, metal knockers clang against heavy wood. A grandma sweeps the ground in front of her shikumen, the broom scratching a staccato beat against the cobblestone. A child cries, seized from sleep.

The porridge vendor continues her route. In vain, she calls out, remembering a time when her goods were beloved by the children of this neighborhood, a time before the wars, when she could afford to use white sugar and sticky rice, when adding lotus seed hearts and osmanthus syrup was standard instead of a great luxury. As she nears the shikumen where the Wang family lives, she pauses, recalling how the young son particularly delighted in her dessert. She bellows out twice: Badaon tsoh! Badaon tsoh!, deep throated, as passionate as if she were calling out to a lover-but she is met with the dim stillness of the upper windows. After a moment, she blots her sleeve against her forehead, leans into her cart, and continues on her way, the echo of her song trailing behind her.

But the Wang household is awake.

Yuping has not slept the entire night; her eyes are puffy and dark. She tries to cover her despair with makeup, but when she catches her reflection in the mirror, the tears resume. Her husband, Chongyi, pretends not to notice. He dresses quietly, parts his salt-and-pepper hair to one side with a fine-toothed comb, and slicks strays with oil. He thinks to gift his son, Haiwen, this comb. It is carved from ivory and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a frivolous vanity he has held on to after all these years when they have sold so much else.

In the next room, their eleven-year-old daughter, Haijun, rummages through her music box, searching for a memento to gift her big brother. On to the floor, she hurls the paper cutout dolls, the hair ribbons, the red crepe flower she palmed from a store's decorative sign. All these so-called treasures and she has nothing worth giving him. In a fury, she balls herself beneath her blanket, hoping to suffocate in the damp jungle of her breath.

In the attic room, the eldest son, Haiming, and his pregnant wife have been up since before dawn. The room is foul with the stench of bile, Ellen having vomited twice. She doesn't want to go to the train station later, she tells her husband. But Haiming only looks at her, silent and somber.

Haiwen is first to descend the stairs. In his new uniform, his armpits are already sweating through the heavy, unforgiving fabric. He steps outside, into the modest courtyard of their shikumen, and looks up at the expanse of sky. The pink is receding, giving way to a noncommittal blue. In several minutes, nothing of that brilliant color will remain, only a veil of thin cloud, like a layer of soy milk skin.

He listens to the longtang's symphony, this comfort he has grown up with. He closes his eyes and sees it all, no longer a symphony but a movie, one more vibrant than any he's attended at the cinema: The cobblestone alleys crammed with wares and possessions. The neighborhood children, laughing as they chase each other. The barber they nearly knock over, Yu yasoh, and his client, Lau Die, whose crown is sparse but beard is full. The nearby breakfast stall opened daily 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 call to a passing vendor, who stops as she lowers a basket with a few coins in exchange for three shriveled loquats. Loh konkon and Zen konkon in the middle of it all, the two men oblivious to the surrounding hubbub as they mull over their daily game of xiangqi, a ritual that continues uninterrupted as it would on any other day.

But it is not any other day.

Haiwen opens his eyes.

Today is the day he is leaving.

In another two...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593712994
ISBN 13 
9780593712993
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
512
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland