The Main Character has landed on the doorstep of a grieving aunt and uncle in San Francisco, whose nine-year-old only child has been murdered during a grocery store robbery. Barely able to cope with their grief, they can only offer the Main Character two weeks in their home. (This is such a good read, dear blog readers. I started reading it in Madrid — and despite all the distractions of travel, continue to savor the writing)
The MC reflects on how San Francisco’s Chinatown both is and is not home.
I stood and looked out on the street. Chinatown wasn’t home, but the tea shops and vegetable markets and the near-countrymen shouldering their way down the crowded sidewalks brought me back to Gejiu. I listened again to the player’s plangent song and as I let it flood me, I decided that homesickness, too, was a kind of pleasure, a countryman’s ache for what’s known.
— The Chinese Groove, p. 111