The Author: Karissa Chen
The Book: Homeseeking (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2025)
The Elevator Pitch: Childhood best friends journey back to each other after sixty years apart as star-crossed soulmates.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Karissa Chen: I had long been researching the stories of people who had fled to Taiwan from China after the Chinese Civil War, but I was never sure how to frame the story, how best to tell these stories. I’d started to tell some of these stories through short stories, and tried another totally different novel, but it didn’t stick.
Then, one day, I was talking to a good friend of mine, a guy I once had a crush on in my early teens, who’d also had a crush on me—oh, high school! Because of various factors, we never ended up dating, and there had been a short period of time in our early twenties where we had wondered what would have happened if we had. It was always in the back of my mind if, given the right timing, something could have happened between us, except one of us was always in a relationship. Anyway, he and I were catching up one evening after several months of not talking, and it was a great conversation that triggered that old question of “What if?” in my head. Except, because I was waist-deep in this research, my next thought became, “What if it hadn’t been silly high school reasons that kept us apart but an entire war?” I’d been finding this to be a common story in my research, how soldiers unwittingly left wives and fiancées and entire families behind. I’m a sucker for a missed connection/will-they-won’t-they story, so I got really caught up in the writing almost immediately.
The friend and I are each now happily married to other people by the way, before anyone asks!
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Chen: If I count the years of focused research I did before setting pen to paper, it’s been over a decade—and I actually first started doing some casual research into this history as early as 2011. But I actively started writing this specific book in early 2017, and we finished editing in late 2023—wherein I wrote totally new material!—so I guess the actual writing took me almost seven years.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Chen: Ha, no. I have at least one failed manuscript sitting in a folder on my hard drive and several other halfway written novels that I tell myself I will get back to someday. What set this book apart is that I cared enough about it to really see it through—I finally had the stamina that writing a novel required. That, combined with the fact that I wrote my earlier manuscripts when I was a less experienced writer. I don’t think I was able to craft a successful novel at that point yet. That being said, I’m terrified of having to try to write the next book, since I’m sure I’ll have to relearn how to write a novel all over again.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Chen: I’m super lucky in that my amazing agent, Michelle Brower, knew exactly which editors to approach with my book, and my fabulous editor, Tara Singh Carlson, offered on my book right away. I am forever indebted to both of them for believing in my book so wholeheartedly from the very beginning.
Rumpus: Which authors/writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Chen: I’m uncertain if this question is about specific writers in my life that acted as cheerleaders or writing that I read that helped me move forward with my writing. Since I have written extensively about the former in my acknowledgements, I’ll answer the latter:
Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts made me cry towards the end of my self-editing process. I was finding it so difficult to edit the book to a point where I felt it was ready to send to agents, and I really wanted to give up because I was so tired of looking at the book. But he has this section in the book where he gives the reader/writer a pep talk, and it was exactly what I needed to push through and finish my revisions.
Also, whenever I needed inspiration to keep writing when I was feeling like my book was a dead, lifeless thing, I flipped through Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Eileen Chang’s Half a Lifelong Romance, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, and Cathy Chung’s The Tenth Muse. Those books really put me in the right frame of mind to both want to write, and to write this particular book.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Chen: To begin with, I initially thought this was going to be a short story! But I kept writing and when I hit page fifty, I thought to myself, “Oh this is gonna be a novella, maybe!” But then the story kept going, and at 100 pages I knew I was in trouble. That was also when I wrote the first “Suchi” chapter that takes place in the past—up until that moment I had only written present day chapters from Haiwen’s point of view.
I also did not know the structure of the book up front! I was writing chapters out of order, and even had one chapter written from both points of view, and I had no idea what I was doing. I’m someone who craves structure though and having no sense of what I was doing or where I was going with the book eventually made me stall out, and for several months, I couldn’t move forward—nothing I wrote worked. It was only when, one day, listening to the cast album of the musical “The Last Five Years”—a musical about two people getting a divorce where one character’s journey goes backwards from the divorce to the beginning of their relationship, and the other goes from their first date to the end—that it clicked for me that this was the structure I was looking for. Once I found that structure, all the other pieces started to fall in place.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Chen: I’ve been honored to have had fiction and nonfiction published in a bunch of places, including Catapult (RIP), Gulf Coast, Guernica, The Cut, Electric Lit, Longreads, and many others. And of course, The Rumpus!
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Chen: That it’s a persistence game. “If you keep knocking, one day someone will open a door.” I know I’m not the most talented writer in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I also knew I would keep working at becoming a better writer and keep trying to get published, for as long as it took. Despite the many periods of self-doubt I had, the stretches where I felt I would never write anything good again—I would always eventually return to my desk, because I wouldn’t let myself give up.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Chen: I used to say that I was writing for a younger version of myself, as a shorthand to say that I was trying to write for someone like me—a Chinese Taiwanese American who craved an understanding of their history, who wanted to see themselves and their family reflected in literature. Now that I have a kid, this feels less theoretical now—I literally am writing so that my child grows up surrounded by greater representation of his identity, culture, and history.
I’m a bit embarrassed to say it took me a while to really get clarity on this—for a long time I didn’t really feel comfortable with owning my identity as an Asian American writer, and for some reason, when I was younger, it never even occurred to me that I could write for an Asian American community. There are a lot of folks I can thank for helping me evolve in this way, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t specifically give a shoutout to the Kundiman community. Not only did attending my first Kundiman retreat help me give myself permission to write about my family’s history and experiences, it also made a big difference to be able to sit in a room full of other Asian American writers and feel like, “Oh, this is the audience I’m writing for.”
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Chen: To be honest, almost all of it is surprising! There was so little I knew about the actual process of getting a book published once it was out of my hands. So almost everything—from the long timeline it takes for a book to get from sale to pub date, the number of times multiple copyeditors will read your book, the things that go into marketing and publicity and selling a book, the fact that “Shelf Awareness” is actually the name of a trade publication and not a punny name for a book app (yes, this is what I actually thought), the way sub rights work and what goes into consideration for different markets—these things have all been surprises.
But perhaps maybe something that is most… striking, if not surprising, is how many people it takes to get a book out into the world and into the right readers’ hands. Of course, I knew that, but seeing the work that goes into it firsthand is something else! As a writer, you spend years alone, trying to make sense of this world you’ve built, and it is almost like this quiet, sacred space. Then you sell your book and all of a sudden, it’s not a solitary thing anymore; all these real-world considerations come into play and all of these other people are involved. I am extremely grateful to these many people (often chronically overworked and underpaid!) for all they are doing to shepherd my book baby into this world.
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Author photograph courtesy of Karissa Chen
