The summer after I graduated from college, I started writing in a journal that my mother had bought years ago. It was a leather-bound, fragile thing. Its spine began to crumble as soon as I started to write in it, but I, ever sentimental, insisted on documenting all of my hopes and desires down longhand. What would I find there, on the other side of the Pacific? Would I be hurt? Would I be happy? Would I still be the same? In the final days of August 2018, I flew from the U.S. to Beijing.

I was headed abroad to volunteer with an NGO that supported schools for the children of migrant laborers—and to write. While my university had granted me this fellowship primarily for volunteer work, the granting committee had also emphasized that they expected me to continue writing while I was abroad—to polish my journalism chops and tell the stories of people who looked like me and whose language I spoke at a fairly elementary level. Better me, a Chinese American, than someone who had parachuted in from even further away, I supposed.

I remember tilting my head upwards, peering at the glass firmament of Beijing International Airport, wondering at wondering. I remember telling a seasoned journalist that I was abroad in part because I was involved in “Asian American advocacy work back home,” and that I wanted to “explore that first part—Asian—a bit more.” That wasn’t untrue. It was also packaged; canned. I thought I was writing a new tale for myself and others—that I was charting new territory—but by the time I returned to the United States a year later, I found that I had written myself into a braided and layered set of narratives that many others have been weaving in the last decade. Asians living in the West have been telling more and more stories about characters who return to Asia.

Many of the most prominent on-screen Asian American hits from recent years have featured return narratives. Crazy Rich Asians (adapted from Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel), released in 2018, spotlights a Chinese American protagonist who visits her fiancé’s family in Singapore. Although her Singaporean fiancé’s return story plays out in the foreground, the protagonist likewise grapples with her own second-generation Chinese American identity over the course of that extended visit. In The Farewell, from 2019, a young Chinese American woman returns to visit her ailing grandmother in northeast China. The protagonist remembers how, many years ago, she had spent the early part of her childhood in China. And, in the 2024 Netflix show The Brothers Sun, a Taiwanese family travels back and forth between Asia and the United States—a reflection of the fluid modern reality of many immigrant families. Many Asian families are no longer constrained by the one-way direction encouraged by past immigration policies.

But this narrative structure is perhaps more noticeable and sophisticated in contemporary literature. Historically, much of Asian American literature depicted East Asian characters and focused heavily on assimilation into American society or on making Asia legible to Westerners. In service of this principle, the early Asian American canon doesn’t really feature robust return narratives. Or, at least this is true of the most visible, mainstream, and economically viable works in the canon. Consider Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 The Woman Warrior or Amy Tan’s 1989 The Joy Luck Club. Both these works tell, among other tales, stories about Chinese American families, their difficulties adjusting to the United States, and the hurt—often predicated on generational divides—that they trade with one other. Both authors have been subsequently criticized for peddling Orientalism. As poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong writes in her essay collection, Minor Feelings, many Asian American writers tended to “set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism.” These writers focused on “outlying forces” of pain: “Asian Patriarchal Fathers, [or] White People Back Then”—which were “remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.”

This sweeping characterization strikes me as somewhat unfair. Earlier Asian American writers, especially those writing before the 1990s, worked within the constraints of the publishing industry. Publishers and readers alike came to expect the transitional experiences of immigrants and the pursuit of the American Dream from authors who even marginally looked like Kingston and Tan. As writer Jay Caspian Kang summarizes, “When I was growing up in the ’90s, the only Asian-American writer I knew was Amy Tan.” As the publishing industry dictated which books reached audiences, it perpetuated a particular mythology that often felt suffocating to younger writers. As Kang himself writes, “I, of course, hated Amy Tan because I considered myself a hard-edged thinker. Her books … embodied a type of minstrelsy … I would look around for Asian authors who were not Amy Tan … I saw few others.”

Against this particular background of internecine quibbling (What is a compelling Asian American story? Can it still focus on the American Dream? What even is the American Dream? Who gets to tell these stories? If they tell it poorly, but to great commercial success, uh, what do we do?)—the recent narrative refocusing by Chinese American writers on returns to China, becomes all the more meaningful, as well as confounding. These return narratives recognize that, between the first major wave of “legalized” Asian immigration to the United States in the late 1960s and today, China has risen as an economic powerhouse. (See how students have rushed to learn Mandarin, businesses have expanded into mainland China, and Chinese American immigrants have even been persuaded by the Chinese government to participate in its Thousand Talents Program, which targeted elite academics and scientists of Chinese descent in the West.) Many Chinese immigrants thought that moving to the West meant brighter futures for themselves and for their children; to now find themselves or their children returning to their home country upends that notion.

Now, instead of making China legible to the West, the authors of return stories are concerned with making China and Chinese Americans more legible to themselves. Over the last decade, Chinese American writers like Ling Ma and Lucy Tan and others have turned their focus to the world’s second-most populous country. Ling Ma’s satirical Severance, from 2018, features Candace, a mid-level publishing employee who finds herself frequently traveling to Shenzhen from New York City on business—an ironic rebuke to her Chinese father’s declaration that their family was “never going back” after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. And Lucy Tan’s What We Were Promised, also from 2018, follows a Chinese American family that returns to Shanghai as expats after the father’s lucrative job transfer.

It is safe to say that, for the people who populate the pages of this growing literary canon, new economic realities enable them to travel back to Asia—for work, yes, and as part of a new globalized economy, yes. But what they discover across the world goes beyond these initial promises.

*

In 1979, a village turned into a city. This fishing village on the southern coast of China sat just across the border from Hong Kong. The locals called the place “deep ditch,” and China’s central government, under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, had grand plans for it.

Prior to Deng’s leadership, China’s economy was closed off to the world and ravaged by war and famine. The country was still reeling from World War II and Japanese invasion, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong. But Deng had some thoughts about how to kick things into gear. In the late 1970s, he set up several “special economic zones” around the country. The idea was to render these bubbles into controlled, limited market economies. The government would experiment with them and use them to catalyze economic reform. The first and greatest of them all ended up being Shenzhen—that little fishing village.

From the very start, Shenzhen’s “magnetic pull was so powerful that it far exceeded all population growth expectations,” as architect Juan Du writes in The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City. Originally, planners targeted 100,000 people as a short-term goal for populating the city. They estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 would be realistic for the year 2000. They were in for a surprise: Migrants from all over the country flocked to Shenzhen, and, by the year 2000, the metropolis was home to over six million people. Today, it boasts a population of more than fifteen million.

Today, then, no city embodies the myth of the recent Chinese economic boom more so than Shenzhen. Unsurprisingly, a fair number of return novels focus on the city. In these stories, characters find themselves returning to China because of the country’s rapid economic growth—growth made possible due to abundant cheap labor and an exploitative export economy—exactly the sort of work for which Shenzhen is notorious. In the 2010s, Shenzhen made world headlines when factory workers killed themselves one after another. These laborers were generally migrants from rural areas; they were also often young. They made Apple iPhones through the contract manufacturer Foxconn. They protested abusive working conditions and unfair pay in the most desperate way: by leaping from the rooftops of factory buildings.

In Ling Ma’s Severance, protagonist Candace visits similar factories in Shenzhen on business trips. On these trips, she stays at a fancy hotel (the “Grand Shenzhen Moon Palace Hotel”) that sports expansive grounds, a golf course, and even an English-style rose garden. The hotel stands in stark contrast to the factories she visits.

But it is in those factories that Candace feels her second-generation Chinese American identity most keenly. In one factory, she listens to two workers argue in Chinese that she can barely understand, but catches one of them telling the other that he is “making a fool of himself in front of the foreigner.” Their spat makes her uncomfortable. Even though she understands that she is a foreigner by all technical definitions, she physically appears Chinese. To avoid thinking more deeply about what her identity means for her work (is she, could she be, a comprador?), she points to a poster on the wall and makes a vapid comment about a movie star, and “something about [her] behavior, in keeping with a dumb enthusiastic American,” puts things back “into perspective.”

Candace has a role to play, and she is happy to play it. Her complacency reflects the novel’s larger concerns: Shen Fever, the zombifying disease that takes over the world, isn’t a disease of unnatural hyperactivity (as the conditions in zombie movies typically are), but one of repetition, familiarity, and comfort in late-capitalist routines. Those infected with it repeat old routines, lose consciousness, and rot away. But even before Shen Fever (which takes its name from Shenzhen, its point of origin) hits the world stage, readers find Candace already walking the same well-worn paths. Early on in the story, one of Candace’s Chinese suppliers suddenly closes, ending production on that particular project. Candace learns that workers are suing that supplier for dangerous working conditions. Armed with that sparse and general knowledge, she hears herself informing her client, “[The workers] are dying.” Candace does not put on this blasé attitude as a performance—in fact, her concern for the faceless, nameless workers is more humane than her client’s response (“I don’t want to sound like we don’t care, because obviously we do, but this is disappointing news”). But Candace repeats her line robotically, as a shield—“They’re dying”—out of her profound discomfort with her relationship to Chinese labor. She knows that those real people—who don’t matter to most people in the West—enable her own white-collar lifestyle.

And before Shenzhen, there was also Shanghai. For many decades, Shanghai was China’s capital of capital. (It remains a financial hub—despite likely losing the title of “capitalism made visible in China” to Shenzhen.) In Lucy Tan’s What We Were Promised, a Chinese American family decides to return to Shanghai when the father, Wei, receives a promotion that allows them to move back as expats. In Shanghai, they live in a fully serviced luxury apartment suite.

Yet, despite these newfound material comforts, Wei and his wife Lina find themselves plagued with discontents and personal insecurities once back in China. Wei is forever embarrassed that he works in marketing at all. And Lina, who had worked in the States as a Chinese-language teacher, now finds herself boxed in as a taitai—an unemployed trophy wife who squanders her time mingling with other rich expat wives from their apartment complex, or otherwise lounging around. She also harbors secret feelings for Wei’s brother Qiang, with whom she was close friends in their youth, and who decides to reemerge in Shanghai upon Wei and Lina’s return after years of spotty contact.

Beyond simple embarrassment, Wei’s qualms about his work sometimes drift into moral ambivalence. He discovers that the China “he’d found upon his return was not the same one that he had left” and fears “that [the country] was getting too rich too fast.” He considers how “if [an ex-farmer] held the right property, [he] could wear fur and eat three-hundred-yuan softshell crabs and buy a Porsche with Swarovski crystals embedded around the logo.” Wei’s own father was an actual farmer who had wholeheartedly invested in the Communist agenda and worked staunchly for a more egalitarian China. Now, his son—Wei—a marketing strategist who feeds Western brands to a country with sudden and immense spending power, worries: “Had he turned into the imperialist the old revolutionaries had feared their children would become?”

Of course, like Candace, Wei does nothing about that worry. Both of them can feel that their status as Asian American returnees is uncertain and unprecedented. For them, for now, riding on the coattails of capital, staying silent is much more comfortable—and lucrative.

*

Both in these stories and in real life, many initial migrations from China to the United States followed the path of capital. As Ling Ma, Lucy Tan, and other authors astutely recognize, people today follow that trail back. And those returnees usually deal silently with any uneasiness they experience from their returns. But what these returnees seek in China can’t fully and easily be explained away by pecuniary promises. To so flatten the complex decision to move back to China from the West, to argue that these returns are legible only in such a context, would be to engage in a form of minstrelsy, too—to perform for White People Right Now, as Hong might call it. Rather, the underlying longing present in return journeys often splinters into a fractal of constituent reasons—an image of a person’s competing desires and responsibilities.

And a number of new return novels focused on mainland China recognize this—the need to attend to the particularities around each individual’s decision and ability to return. Like Severance and What We Were Promised, these stories follow characters who chase the American Dream (by pursuing graduate school in the United States; thinking that the future lay westwards), only to find themselves or their children returning to China. Authors like Linda Rui Feng, Belinda Huijuan Tang, and Aube Rey Lescure write return narratives that, in various ways, tease out nebulous concerns about lives not lived—“what ifs?”—and spotlight them for readers. 

Linda Rui Feng’s 2021 novel, Swimming Back to Trout River, is bookended by a father’s promises to his daughter that he will return from his studies in the American Midwest to retrieve her from China (and then bring her to the United States, too). Ultimately, the father, Momo, does not make it back in time. His friend Dawn, who also left China for the U.S., returns in his stead, wondering all the while about how her current life came to be. Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing, from 2022, centers on a man named Tang Yitian who leaves behind his abusive father and rural Chinese village to pursue an academic career in America. But when his father suddenly goes missing, Yitian finds himself returning to his childhood home in the hinterlands of Anhui Province to aid in the search. There, he confronts the woman he loved in his youth and grapples with his road not taken.

And Aube Rey Lescure’s 2024 novel, River East, River West, takes the central questions at the heart of the Chinese American return novel and turns them on their heads. Essentially, Lescure writes a return novel without a literal return. Instead of featuring a Chinese American character returning to China at all, River East, River West features a Chinese man, Lu Fang, who tries to immigrate but never makes it—a character who actually lives the counterfactual life wondered about by so many characters in return stories: What if I had stayed? The novel also features Lu Fang’s lover, a white woman named Sloan, who moves to China to escape America. Sloan’s daughter, young mixed-race Alva, is born and raised in China, but still holds American citizenship. It is Alva’s particular predicament that is essentially that of a returnee’s—at one point, she accidentally calls China “your country” and not “our [country]” when fending off a school bully. And her mother’s marriage to her stepfather Lu Fang is declared by wedding guests as representing “a new era of Sino-American friendship!”—as emblematic of new global economic developments.

And yet Lescure’s novel still fits more neatly into the growing body of return literature than any of those earlier works that Cathy Park Hong criticizes for intentionally “set[ting] trauma in a distant mother country.” For although River East, River West takes place entirely in mainland China, both its acknowledgement of how the world’s economic heart has shifted toward China and its preoccupation with counterfactual migration narratives place it squarely in this canon.

People travel for many reasons. People return to places for many reasons. People all the time think they know themselves; who they have been. Accordingly, the Chinese American return narrative is neither clean nor singular. These contemporary novels feature all sorts of returns. As Belinda Huijuan Tang writes about her returnee protagonist Yitian in A Map for the Missing, “[He] had chosen his life. He made blanks by leaving and refusing to come back … Forever, he would hope to retrieve the very things he’d decided to let go.”

But while characters harbor diverse reasons for returning, and while changed economic conditions make their returns viable (Yitian and Momo are no longer broke graduate students, after all), these characters may also, more than anything, be seeking a glimpse of the other people they might have been.

*

In 1984, the Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston traveled to China for the first time. Kingston was born in California and has lived in the United States all her life. She only visited China under the auspices of an American writers’ delegation.

There, she famously rode on a river cruise down the picturesque Li River in southern China with fellow luminaries Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko. Their boat passed by a young Chinese woman washing laundry by the riverside. As they drifted away from her, Morrison waved and said, “Goodbye, Maxine,” to the woman.

At the time, Kingston thought, Morrison gets it.

What Morrison understood, as Kingston later recounted, was that Kingston could so easily have been that woman on the shore had her family not immigrated. Deep inside the bones of so many Asian American stories lies a preoccupation with counterfactuals, with lives left unlived. Readers surely witnessed some of this in the immigrant narratives for which Kingston’s generation was so well-known—but readers now see this anxiety sharpened to a fine point in return stories.

In What We Were Promised, Lina shows us precisely what that looks like. Lina cares for her husband—polished, rule-following, straight-A student Wei. Wei fits the typical profile of many Chinese who came to the United States after authorities lifted a racist immigration ban in 1965. Those immigrants largely depended on scholarship and professional training. But Lina can’t stop wondering: What life might she have led had she chosen the wild, unpredictable Qiang, the other brother, the one who stayed in China? Her repressed desire, which becomes nearly unbearable when Qiang unexpectedly reappears in their lives, operates both narratively and symbolically. In contrast to his brother and other post-1965 Chinese immigrants, Qiang, who keeps one foot in the criminal underworld and lives a high-risk, high-earnout lifestyle, represents the quick-money schemes available in mainland China today.

Perhaps the most explicit articulation yet of return literature’s preoccupation with lives not lived can be found in Linda Rui Feng’s Swimming Back to Trout River. In Feng’s novel, Dawn and Momo form an intense friendship while in college in Beijing, activated in part by their shared love of music. Their depth of feeling goes beyond platonic friendship, too. But they realize, shortly after a transformative experience at a classical music concert, that they must part ways. Momo still believes in the utility of music—in art that serves society. Dawn, on the other hand, wants to “write music … from inside [her]self”—and, as she confides this to Momo, she “already feel[s] something slipping away from between them, something she knew she would miss.” The two of them agree to “remember [that] evening … exactly like this … even when [their] teeth start falling out.” And, “[f]or a moment, anything seemed possible between them.”

What actually happens between them is that their lives take divergent paths, moving away from each other even as they intersect in unexpected ways. Momo marries a woman from his workplace, Cassia, who carries her own profound trauma, and who, as a result, will never be able to love Momo without reservation. They have a daughter, Junie, entrusting her to the care of Momo’s parents as their marriage breaks down and Momo heads off to graduate school in the United States. Dawn realizes, in part through harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution, that she might never be able to write the music she wants to write if she stays in mainland China. When given the chance to visit the United States on a musical delegation, she makes the risky choice to defect—to stay.

Dawn rises up the ranks in the world of classical music. Soon, “every interviewer asked to recount the exact moment when she knew she would leave China behind.” She pens a popular piece called “From the Gobi’s Shore,” which critics describe as “nostalgic.” How little the music critics know! “[I]t was nostalgic not for a place or regime, but for a kind of youthful certainty that life must be so,” Dawn thinks to herself. “The last time she felt that certainty was when she was walking out of [that] concert hall .… when she couldn’t wait to announce to Momo what her destiny was going to be.”

During this time, Momo grinds through his graduate studies alone in the Midwest, estranged from Cassia and apart from Junie. He writes to Junie that he will be back for her soon, on her twelfth birthday, after which he intends to bring her to the United States with him. Momo envisions his retrieval of Junie as a short, non-economic return—unlike Wei and Lina’s decision to move to Shanghai full-time as expats—but Momo nonetheless understands it as a return of monumental significance. Indeed, Feng uses Momo’s promise structurally. Momo’s promise frames the whole story, contextualizing his ever-changing feelings about his heritage. For instance, one weekend, Momo decides to host a celebration at his apartment for his American friends. As he reasons through his menu for that night, he finds that he “wanted to prove to himself that the old country had not receded from him after four years of being abroad, that a part of himself … could still be recovered.” He shocks himself with this desire for returning, even if he cannot physically return then. He “was surprised by the sentiment of nostalgia in what he just uttered,” especially because “[a]ll his life he’d been leaving [his home village] Trout River again and again … without blinking. All his life he saw clinging to one’s roots as weakness … Yet here he was, in his middle age, succumbing to just that kind of weakness.”

Momo calls it weakness, but readers know that he is being too hard on himself. Due to an unexpected chain of events, Momo ultimately can’t show up at his parents’ doorstep to retrieve Junie on her birthday. Instead, Dawn returns on his behalf. Towards the end of the novel, Dawn shows Junie how to hold a violin, the same way she taught the girl’s father when they were young. But just before Dawn returns, before she makes her way to this little village in southern China, she thinks to herself that “[p]erhaps she had written ‘From the Gobi’s Shore’ for a hypothetical life not lived.” She knows that “it had been an accumulation of favorable accidents … everything that made up her biography, down to the most prosaic detail, could just as well have been otherwise.”

*

The canon of return literature continues to grow. While the novels that focus on mainland China provide one informative lens through which to understand this particular narrative, these novels by no means form the entire body. Consider, for example, Filipina author Gina Apostol’s novel Insurrecto, or Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura’s works, or Emily X.R. Pan’s young adult novel The Astonishing Color of After, about a teenage girl who returns to Taiwan. With so many dimensions to this grouping, is it now possible to write a work of return literature without an actual return journey? Before Aube Rey Lescure’s River East, River West, that didn’t seem quite possible. And yet Lescure shows us that it might be done, and that exciting things remain in store.

In River East, River West, newfound economic opportunities in China enable Sloan, a white American woman running away from an American past, to move to China in the first place. She is not returning, per se; she is not Chinese. But she represents the modern economic shift towards Asia, and towards mainland China in particular—towards a new concentration of capital there. As Sloan’s daughter Alva puts it, “[T]oward China the world now converged. It was her own beating heart.”

Sloan and Alva seem to meet Alva’s stepfather, Lu Fang, halfway. Lu Fang and Sloan love each other when they are young, after a chance meeting in northeast China, not long after Sloan arrives in China as an itinerant English teacher. They only reconnect years later in Shanghai. And when the two finally reunite, Lescure reveals how the fast-paced economic changes in the country have changed their understanding of themselves—how they can make their lives legible to themselves and to each other. In the time since he last saw Sloan, Lu Fang has done well for himself. Once a lowly clerk at a shipyard, he has since tapped into those export markets made possible by Deng’s reforms—those special economic zones. For so long, Lu Fang had hoped to leave mainland China—even as his lover ran towards China at the same time. Seeing how she, too, has changed in the many years since their last encounter, he feels something “loosen” in him. Life has “passed over them,” he realizes: “Look at him now, paunchy and hollowed by grief in the back seat of his taxi, and at her with her hair dye and her sad, drunken eyes.” But “[i]t didn’t matter” to Lu Fang, “because in the past twenty years they’d reinvented themselves. The whole nation ran on reinvention.”

In present-day cultural conversations about China, these questions of What if I or my parents had stayed in China? can present as stemming from what scholar Nan Z. Da calls a “crass, market-driven, rise-of-China zeitgeist.” Although this “zeitgeist” has appeared to subside with the COVID-19 pandemic and political hostilities between China and the West, when taken at face value, it still functions as a reductive explanation for why characters—why people—return to China. It explains away those difficult and thorny feelings of regret, of alienation, of harbored disillusionment that most returnees feel. It sweeps away the reality that many people who left China left something behind in one way or another.

I, for one, have found the dynamic of the counterfactual difficult to express in everyday conversation with friends or family. For me, it never seems to come across gracefully in spoken words. It sometimes even risks sounding ungrateful.

And yet there is a form—neither Da’s academic scholarship nor everyday conversation—that has long been dedicated to exploring this tension. A medium that is better equipped to capture all its attendant transcendence and ugliness. One that probes people who are “trapped by [their] circumstances” and accesses their interiority, as Rothman recognizes. One that does not train its eyes merely on market forces.

That form is, of course, the novel.

In Severance, when Candace’s favorite cousin tells her seriously, “One day, you’ll want to return [to China] permanently,” she laughs and jovially tells him, “That would be terrible.” But Candace finds that her cousin’s words carve a hollow in her mind, one that she fills with visions as they walk down the street together: “In my imagining, I return from New York. I do whatever my uncles say. I relearn Mandarin. I relearn Fujianese. I get married to another Fujianese. I live here … I am so happy.” Of course, crossing in the direction of this imagining is the real past—her parents stroll into an American supermarket for the first time and are so overwhelmed by the abundance that they don’t know what to buy. They end up buying a gallon of whole milk, a luxury back in China, and share it.

*

In Beijing, I walked into the local pastry shop. I walked into the KFC by the mall. I walked through convenience stores, down aisles that today are laden with unfathomable amounts and varieties of food. Mandopop blasted from the speakers. People chattered in Chinese around me. I felt a sudden loosening in my heart as I listened to that music, both recorded and natural. I stopped and leaned in closer to what felt so “foreign” and yet familiar in those sounds. I mused about how I had moved across time zones while flying into Asia—the poetry and gimmickry of how I had gone into the literal future and into my parents’ pasts at once. I could only say, as I grabbed things from the shelves, struggled to use QR codes for payment, picked up a bucket of fried chicken for my American Thanksgiving in China—that it took me back to somewhere I could not remember but that I knew that I knew all the same.