The Unreachable Past and the Impossibility of Return in Homeseeking

The Thematic Claim: Visible but Ungraspable Time

The novel opens with two epigraphs that together form its central thesis about time and loss. The first, from the film In the Mood for Love, describes bygone years as visible through a dusty windowpane but impossible to grasp—a longing to break through the glass and walk back into vanished time. The second, from Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance, delivers a blunt verdict: we can't go back. These two statements—one aching with desire, the other resigned to impossibility—frame the entire book. Homeseeking argues that the past remains perpetually visible to those who lived it, yet structurally unreachable: characters can remember, mourn, and even physically revisit the places of their youth, but they cannot return to the selves they were or the lives they might have lived. The novel's unusual narrative structure—Suchi's story moving forward in time while Haiwen's moves backward—reinforces this theme, suggesting that the two lovers are always approaching each other from opposite directions, never able to meet in the moment they both long for.

The Epigraphs as Thesis

The epigraph chapter establishes the theme before the story begins. The dusty windowpane image captures the paradox at the heart of the novel: the past is not hidden or forgotten—it is fully visible, even vivid—but it cannot be touched. Haiwen and Suchi remember each other with extraordinary clarity across decades; the shikumen neighborhood remains etched in their memories; the music of the violin still plays in their minds. Yet every attempt to reach across that glass fails. The second epigraph, Shijun's line from Eileen Chang, delivers the counterpoint: no matter how clearly you can see what you've lost, return is impossible. Together, the epigraphs pose the question the novel will explore: if the past is so present, why can't it be reclaimed?

Howard's 1993 Return: Physical Presence, Emotional Absence

The most direct test of the theme comes in April 1993, when Howard returns to Shanghai for the first time in decades. He walks the lanes of Sifo Li with his sister Junjun, and the neighborhood is both familiar and alien. The doors, the red brick, the carved flowers above the doorways—these remain. But the density of electrical wires, the air-conditioning units, the bright plastic awnings, the laundry hanging overhead—everything else has changed. The shikumen where he grew up is now occupied by strangers; the sitting room where his mother received guests is crammed with haphazard furniture under ugly fluorescent light. Howard feels like a lonely spirit pacing the corridors, longing for a friendly face that no one can see.

The scene crystallizes the theme's central paradox. Howard has physically returned to the place of his childhood, but the past is no more reachable than it was from across the sea. The shikumen is a shell; the life that filled it is gone. His mother kept the property for decades, refusing to move, worried that if she left, Haiwen wouldn't know where to find them when he came back. She wanted a home waiting for his return. But by the time Howard arrives, his mother is dead, and the home she preserved has been rented out to strangers. The letters he sent—unsigned, unaddressed, full of references no one else could understand—were turned in by tenants who didn't know who they were for. The past was waiting, but the message never arrived.

Howard's involuntary steps toward Suchi's shikumen deepen the sense of impossibility. He has the overwhelming feeling she is still there, waiting for him, that she has been waiting all these years and if he knocked on the door, she would open it, unchanged, still a girl of sixteen. But the lane is still and bare. She is not there. The fantasy of return—that the past is preserved somewhere, waiting to be re-entered—is exposed as an illusion. Even the memory of their first kiss, which he recalls with such tenderness, belongs to a world that no longer exists.

The 2008 Reunion: The Argument Over Return

Fifteen years later, in February 2008, Howard and Suchi meet again in California. Their conversation becomes the novel's most explicit debate about whether the past can be reclaimed. Howard, newly widowed after Linyee's death, wants to right history with Suchi, to restart their lives and cram everything that had been robbed from them into the next five, ten, twenty years. He invokes the fortune teller's prophecy of yuanfen—the idea that they were destined to find each other again. He wants to believe that the past can be re-entered, that the selves they were can be recovered.

Suchi refuses. We can never again be who we were, she tells him. It's impossible. We've already missed each other. When Howard presses, she delivers the novel's clearest statement of its theme: the Suchi he knew evaporated decades ago, was killed off in the war just like everyone else, and what took her place is the woman sitting before him now, who survived by not looking backward.

This is the thematic claim in its starkest form. The past is not merely distant; it is dead. The girl Suchi was, the boy Haiwen was—these people were killed off in the war, replaced by survivors who carry their memories but cannot return to their former selves. Suchi's survival strategy has been to refuse the backward glance entirely. Howard's has been to keep looking, to keep hoping. The novel does not simply endorse one position over the other; it shows both as responses to the same unbearable truth.

Suchi's Journey: Home as People, Not Places

Yet the novel complicates Suchi's position. In spring 2008, she finally agrees to fly to Shanghai to meet her mother, who is alive but nearly blind and not always lucid. The journey is an act of return—not to a place, but to a person. Suchi reflects that home isn't a place, isn't moments that could be pinned down; it is people, people who share the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone and places long disappeared. This reframing suggests a partial answer to the theme's dilemma: you cannot return to the past, but you can return to the people who carry it with you. The ghosts—the shared memories of Sifo Li, of the shikumen, of the songs and meatballs and lanterns—are what make home possible.

Suchi's hopes for the reunion are modest and specific. She wants to hold her mother's hand, to place it against her face, to say it's your daughter, Suji, returned. She wants to know if her mother can still hum the songs she used to sing, if she can teach Suchi how to make her famous meatballs. She wants to introduce Haiwen to her mother and tell her that her lanterns worked—they found each other again. These are not attempts to reclaim the past but to touch it, to verify that it existed, that the people who witnessed it are still there. The chapter's final hope—that her mother will recognize her—captures the fragile, conditional nature of this kind of return. Even the most determined journey may end in a face that does not know you.

Yuping's Deathbed: The Letter That Cannot Be Sent

The novel's most poignant treatment of the theme comes in June 1982, in the chapter focalized through Yuping, Haiwen's mother, on her deathbed. Yuping has spent her final years waiting for Haiwen to return. She kept the shikumen, she lit lanterns, she hoped for miracles. Now, as she dies, she tries to dictate a letter to her children: come home, we are waiting, nothing is your fault. But Sieu'in, her friend and caretaker, reveals she never learned to read or write. The letter cannot be sent. Yuping imagines it anyway—written in beautiful calligraphy, folded, stamped, carried across the sea to Haiwen—but the fantasy is precisely that: a fantasy. The message of return never reaches its intended recipient.

The scene also contains the gold ring, which Yuping presses into Sieu'in's hand, insisting it belongs to Sieu'in's daughter. The ring—originally given to Suchi by her mother, pawned by her father, recovered and passed along—becomes a token of connection across the impossible distance of the past. It is one of the few objects that survives the rupture, a physical link between mothers and daughters, between the world before and the world after. But even the ring's journey is incomplete: Sieu'in recognizes it as something she once bought for Suji, and the recognition is a kind of return—a moment when the past becomes tangible, if only briefly.

Yuping's final wish is to tell her children that the past doesn't matter anymore; they all did what they had to in order to live. This is a mother's attempt to release her children from the burden of the unreachable past—to say that the impossibility of return is not a failure but a condition of survival. Yet the novel does not let this wisdom land easily. Yuping cannot speak; her children squabble over blame; the words she wants to say remain unheard. The past, even when forgiven, cannot be undone.

Complexity and Contradiction

The theme resists a single resolution. Suchi insists that looking backward is a form of death, yet she ultimately flies to Shanghai to meet her mother. Howard believes the past can be reclaimed, yet his return to the shikumen reveals only its transformation. Yuping's letter—the novel's most explicit statement of the desire for return—is never delivered. The gold ring passes from hand to hand, but its meaning shifts with each bearer. The violin, left at Suchi's door in 1947, becomes a symbol of what was abandoned and what was carried forward.

The novel's structure itself embodies the contradiction. Suchi's narrative moves forward in time; Howard's moves backward. They are always approaching each other, but from opposite directions—a formal representation of the impossibility of meeting in the past. The epigraph's dusty windowpane remains intact throughout the novel. Characters can see through it, can remember what lies beyond it, can even reach toward it. But they cannot break it. The past is visible, vivid, and permanently out of reach.

Study Questions

1. How do the two epigraphs work together to establish the novel's central tension about the past?

The first epigraph, from In the Mood for Love, describes bygone years as visible through a dusty windowpane—something you can see but not grasp, and which you long to break through to reclaim. The second, from Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance, states flatly that we can't go back. Together they pose the novel's central question: if the past is so vividly present in memory, why is return impossible?

1. In the 1993 Shanghai visit, what does Howard find when he returns to the shikumen, and how does this scene dramatize the theme?

Howard finds the neighborhood both changed and familiar—new wires, awnings, and air-conditioning units alongside the peeling black doors and red brick. The shikumen itself is occupied by strangers, the sitting room transformed. His mother kept the property waiting for his return, but by the time he arrives, she is dead and the home is rented out. The letters he sent were turned in by tenants who didn't understand them. He feels like a lonely spirit no one can see, and he has the overwhelming feeling that Suchi is still waiting for him as a girl of sixteen—a feeling the empty lane immediately contradicts.

1. What is Suchi's argument against Howard's desire to right history in their 2008 conversation, and how does it reflect her survival strategy?

Suchi insists that they can never again be who they were and that they've already missed each other. She tells Howard that the Suchi he knew evaporated decades ago and was killed off in the war, replaced by a woman who survived by not looking backward. For Suchi, the past is not a place to return to but a set of losses to be carried forward; her survival has depended on refusing the backward glance.

1. How does Yuping's deathbed scene in 1982 complicate the theme of the unreachable past?

Yuping tries to dictate a letter telling her children to come home, that nothing is their fault, but Sieu'in cannot read or write, so the letter is never sent. Yuping imagines it being delivered, but the fantasy is unfulfilled. At the same time, she passes the gold ring to Sieu'in, recognizing it as belonging to Suchi—a rare moment when the past becomes tangible. The scene suggests that even the most desperate desire for return cannot overcome the practical and emotional barriers that separate people from their pasts.

1. How does Suchi's 2008 journey to Shanghai redefine home in relation to the theme?

Suchi comes to understand that home isn't a place but people who share the same ghosts as you. This reframing offers a partial answer to the impossibility of return: you cannot go back to the past, but you can go to the people who carry it with you. Her hopes are modest—to hold her mother's hand, to be recognized, to share memories of songs and meatballs—suggesting that the closest one can come to return is through connection with those who witnessed the same vanished world.