Forever on the Way Home

Some loves are never lost nor forgotten. They simply wait.

There are decisions capable of altering the course of an entire life. In a Shanghai neighbourhood in 1940s China, teenagers Haiwen and Suchi discover love, believing that it was destiny that brought them together so early in their childhood. However, when Haiwen secretly enlists in the army to spare his brother from conscription, the future they imagined together falls apart in an instant, leaving them both only with the memory of an interrupted love.

For decades, Haiwen and Suchi’s paths follow opposite courses, crossing only once, by chance, on a boat in Hong Kong in 1966—a brief but unforgettable encounter. A hand-span of decades later, now in Los Angeles, USA, Haiwen looks up in the supermarket where he works and sees Suchi again. As they rediscover their lost intimacy, the possibility of a second life—the one they always felt belonged to them—is reborn, even if the weight of the past never leaves them.

Narrated in alternating voices, Eternally on the Way Home, by Taiwanese-American Karissa Chen, traverses the most turbulent periods of modern Chinese history and follows these lovers separated by Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States of America.