The Sea in Homeseeking: A Motif of Separation, Exile, and the Hope of Return

What the Sea Is in Homeseeking

The sea in Karissa Chen's Homeseeking is both a literal geographic feature and a charged emotional landscape. Characters cross it between Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and America, but the novel rarely presents the sea as a neutral passage. Instead, it appears as a boundary that separates people from home, a site of longing and despair, and—occasionally—a horizon of hope. The novel's epigraphs set the tone: the first, from In the Mood for Love, describes bygone years as visible but ungraspable through a dusty windowpane; the second, from Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance, states flatly, “Shijun, we can't go back.” The sea is the physical embodiment of that dusty glass—the thing you can see across but cannot cross back over.

The Sea as Separation and Exile

The sea first appears as the barrier that divides the Tsan sisters from their parents. In September 1948, Suchi and Sulan leave Shanghai for Hong Kong on what their father presents as a business trip. The trip becomes permanent exile as Shanghai falls to the Communists in May 1949. In Hong Kong, Suchi and Sulan send packages of oil, rice, and money to their parents through couriers, hoping they will find a way to cross the border. The sea is the unspoken fact between them: their parents cannot cross it, and the sisters cannot return. Suchi's longing for home is so acute that she fantasizes about an alternate self who stayed in Shanghai, sleeping next to Haiwen in a shared bed. The sea is what makes that fantasy impossible.

For Haiwen, the sea is even more explicitly a cage. Stationed in Keelung, Taiwan, in February 1959, he describes the island as a “tropical cage” with no way out. The surrounding water reminds him how far the borders of his home have receded. He has calculated the distance from Keelung to Shanghai: 680 kilometers, a straight line he has drawn on a map. The precision of that measurement—the exact number of kilometers between him and home—shows how the sea has become an obsession, a number he can hold in his mind even when he cannot cross it.

The Sea as a Site of Despair and Death

The sea is also where the novel's characters confront death. In Keelung, Haiwen learns that Li Tsin, a fellow soldier, drowned after attempting to steal a fisherman's boat and jumping into the harbor despite being unable to swim. Haiwen recognizes the fury and desperation behind Li Tsin's leap. He understands it not as a death wish but as a desperate gamble—the belief that longing itself might be powerful enough to carry a man across thousands of meters of water. Haiwen imagines Li Tsin swimming home, stroke after stroke, buoyed by the promise of home, perhaps even reaching shore. The sea here is both a grave and a fantasy of impossible return.

Suchi's encounter with the sea is more direct. In March 1966, trapped in her engagement to Lam Saikeung and overwhelmed by grief, she takes the Star Ferry across Hong Kong harbor intending to jump. Standing at the railing, she wonders whether the ocean would take her back to Shanghai, back home. The question reveals the sea's double nature: it is the water that would kill her, but also the water that connects her to home. She cannot go through with it—first a child's gaze stops her, then the realization that she cannot find any trace of her parents or Haiwen in the world. The sea becomes the place where she nearly ends her life, and also the place where she encounters Haiwen again on the return crossing, a ghostly apparition who will reunite with her over tea.

The Sea as Hope and the Possibility of Return

Despite its associations with separation and death, the sea also carries hope. Haiwen's fantasy of Li Tsin swimming home is one version of this hope—the belief that love for home might be strong enough to overcome the sea itself. The novel's structure, with Suchi's narrative moving forward and Haiwen's moving backward, suggests that the sea is not just a barrier but also a connection: the two characters are always on opposite sides of it, but the water is what links their stories.

Lam Saikeung offers a contrasting relationship to the sea. His dream is to have a fleet of over a hundred ships, his name emblazoned across the seas. For him, the sea is not a barrier but a resource, a space of commerce and ambition. He has crossed it successfully and built his fortune on trade routes. His relationship to the water is instrumental—the sea is something to be used, not yearned for. This contrast highlights how the sea's meaning depends on the character's relationship to home. For those who have left home unwillingly (Haiwen, Suchi), the sea is a wound. For those who have chosen the sea as a path to success (Lam Saikeung), it is an opportunity.

The Sea and the Unreachable Past

The sea's most persistent meaning in Homeseeking is as the physical manifestation of the unreachable past and the impossibility of return. The epigraphs frame the novel's central concern: the past is visible but not graspable, and “we can't go back.” The sea is what makes this literal. Characters can see across it—Haiwen can calculate the exact distance to Shanghai—but they cannot cross it. The sea is the dusty windowpane of the first epigraph, the thing that separates the characters from everything they have lost.

This is most poignant in the novel's final chapters. Haiwen's mother, dying in Shanghai in June 1982, hears his violin in the distance and believes he is coming home. She wants to tell him she is waiting for him, that she will keep waiting. The sea is the unspoken distance between them—the water that has kept them apart for decades. Her friend Sieu'in promises to tell Haiwen that his mother waited as long as she could. The sea is what made that waiting necessary, and what made it futile.

Character and Theme Connections

The sea connects directly to the novel's major themes. It is the physical embodiment of the unreachable past and the impossibility of return—the theme announced in the epigraphs. It is also central to the theme of displacement and multilingual identity in the diaspora: characters cross the sea and find themselves in new linguistic worlds, learning Cantonese in Hong Kong, Taiwanese in Keelung, English in America. Suchi's name changes as she crosses the sea—she becomes “Soukei” in Cantonese, a name that sounds rough to her ears. The sea is what makes these transformations necessary.

The sea also connects to music as memory and emotional refuge. Haiwen's violin is the object he leaves behind in Shanghai, the thing that links him to Suchi across the water. When Suchi hears a violin in Hong Kong, she thinks it is Haiwen. The sea separates them, but music—like the sea—carries across distance. And the sea connects to the theme of forgetting as survival versus remembering as healing: Haiwen's nightly ritual of flipping through his mental gallery of loved ones' faces is a way of holding onto people across the water. The sea threatens to erase them; memory is the only defense.

Study Questions

1. How does the sea function differently for Haiwen in Taiwan versus Suchi in Hong Kong?

For Haiwen, the sea is a cage. In Keelung, he describes Taiwan as a “tropical cage” surrounded by water that reminds him how far he is from home. He has calculated the exact distance to Shanghai—680 kilometers—and the precision of this measurement shows how the sea has become an obsession. For Suchi, the sea is more ambivalent. On the Star Ferry in 1966, she wonders whether the ocean would take her back to Shanghai, even as she contemplates jumping into it. The sea is both a potential grave and a potential path home. Haiwen experiences the sea as confinement; Suchi experiences it as a site of both despair and miraculous reunion.

2. What does Li Tsin's drowning reveal about the sea as a symbol?

Li Tsin's death reveals the sea as a place where longing becomes fatal. He jumps into the harbor despite being unable to swim, driven by fury and desperation. Haiwen interprets this not as suicide but as a desperate belief that the longing for home might be powerful enough to carry a man across the water. The sea is thus a test of faith: it rewards those who can cross it and destroys those who cannot. Li Tsin's death also haunts Haiwen, who recognizes the same desperation in himself. The sea is where the novel's characters confront the limits of their own hope.

3. How does the sea connect to the novel's epigraphs about the unreachable past?

The epigraphs describe the past as visible but ungraspable—like a dusty windowpane—and declare that “we can't go back.” The sea is the physical form of this impossibility. Characters can see across it, can calculate the distance, can imagine the other shore, but they cannot cross it. The sea makes the epigraphs literal: it is the dusty glass that separates characters from their bygone years. Haiwen's map with its straight line from Keelung to Shanghai is an attempt to grasp what cannot be grasped—to measure the distance to a home he cannot return to.

4. How does Lam Saikeung's relationship to the sea contrast with Haiwen's and Suchi's?

Lam Saikeung dreams of a fleet of over a hundred ships, his name emblazoned across the seas. For him, the sea is a resource, a space of commerce and ambition. He has crossed it successfully and built his fortune on trade. This contrasts sharply with Haiwen and Suchi, for whom the sea is a wound—a barrier between them and everything they love. Lam Saikeung uses the sea; Haiwen and Suchi are trapped by it. The contrast reveals that the sea's meaning depends on the character's relationship to home. For those who left willingly, the sea is opportunity. For those who left unwillingly, it is exile.